Journal articles on the topic 'Chinese industrial heritage'

With the rapid development of the transformation and urbanization of Chinese social structures, more and more industrial heritage renewal projects are emerging. However, there are significant policy risks associated with Chinese industrial heritage renewal projects. Through a literature review, a total of 20 policy risk factors were determined, and a total of 10 industrial heritage renewal project managers in six regions nationwide conducted a pilot study. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect 398 evaluations of these 20 risk factors from relevant professionals. Secondly, through confirmatory factor analysis, a six-part policy risk assessment model was established. The results indicated that the critical variables that affect the policy risk level were: (1) industry maturity, (2) tax policy, (3) financial freedom, (4) the rule of law, (5) local market size, and (6) local market experience. Moreover, there are significant opportunities and policy risks in Chinese industrial heritage renewal projects, and appropriate strategies can capture these opportunities and mitigate risks. As there are few pieces of research on the policy risks of industrial heritage renewal projects in China, this study has a certain reference significance for the policy risk management of industrial heritage renewal projects in China.

Purpose With the dramatic transformation of China’s industrial landscape, since the late 1990s, adaptive reuse of industrial heritage for cultural purposes has become a widely occurring phenomenon in major Chinese cities. The existing literature mainly focusses on specific cases, yet sees heritage conservation similarly at both national and regional scale and rarely identifies the main factors behind the production of China’s industrial-heritage reuse. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences in heritage reuse outcomes among three Chinese mega-cities and explore the driving factors influencing the differences. Design/methodology/approach This paper compares selected industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, and explores the local intervening factors influencing differences in their reuse patterns, including the history of industrial development, the availability of the nineteenth and/or twentieth century industrial buildings, the existence of cultural capital and the prevalence of supportive regional government policy. Findings The industrial-heritage reuse in the three cities is highly regional. In Beijing, the adaptation of industrial heritage has resulted from the activities of large-scale artist communities and the local government’s promotion of the city’s cultural influence; while in Shanghai, successful and more commercially oriented “sea culture” artists, private developers in creative industries and the “creative industry cluster” policy make important contributions. Chongqing in contrast, is still at the early stage of heritage conservation, as demonstrated by its adaptive reuse outcomes. Considering its less-developed local cultural economy, Chongqing needs to adopt a broader range of development strategies. Originality/value The paper contributes to knowledge by revealing that the production of industrial-heritage cultural precincts in Chinese mega-cities is influenced by regional level factors, including the types of industrial heritage, the spontaneous participation of artist communities and the encouragement of cultural policy.

Along with the increase in modern industry, original facilities and cultures have disappeared progressively, leading to the disappearance of traditional values. However, from the perspective of the stewardship of industrial heritage, preservation is vital for Western Europe, where the Industrial Revolution emerged firstly, and it has leading technology in terms of the advanced stewardship of industrial heritage protection. Meanwhile, there is a large market for industrial heritage growth in China, but its stewardship began later. Horizontal and vertical research into the stewardship of the industrial heritage of these two regions offers a review of the developed industrial regions and experiences for developing industrial regions in their future expansion. By analysing the values and dilemmas and the features of the legal, administrative, and fund guarantee systems, this paper summarizes the advanced expertise of the stewardship of industrial heritage in Western Europe and China and proposes strategies based on them.

Anyuan Coal Mine is an important part of Chinese modern coalmine industrial heritage. The thesis discusses the components and current situation of the heritage, elaborates its valuation, and studies its preservation strategy.

Concerning on the current vague definition of industrial design in China, this paper indicates that industrial design and engine design are compound concept. In the first place, it introduces the definition and theory of industrial design. Then, by analyzing design development and industry development relationship, it regards modern industrial design as a heritage and a production from the development of traditional handcraft design. Finally, it proposes that in order to regulate a modern design theory with Chinese characteristics. We must learn the advanced industrial design theory from the west. At the same time, we must fully excavate the essence of traditional Chinese handicraft culture. Also we should integrate Chinese traditional handicraft design theory into the west modern industrial design theory.

AbstractThe article explores the morphological evolution of China’s 20th-century architecture chronologically. Chinese Neoclassicism has played a major role in forming the 20th-century heritage buildings surviving today. The phenomenon of Neoclassicism emerged because of the late arrival of China’s modernisation and industrialisation process compared with the West. In turn, in accepting and contesting Western culture, the Chinese elite have consciously relied upon architecture as a vehicle to uphold visible symbols of national Chinese identity and traditional Chinese culture. Meanwhile, in the foreign settlements of the treaty ports such as Shanghai, the Western Neoclassical style, along with other imported construction trends, also forms part of China’s 20th-century architectural heritage. Western Neoclassicism’s influence on China’s new architecture became even more evident in the mid-20th century, with the modern architectural heritage in Tiananmen Square as its exemplar. Nevertheless, the impact of Western modernist architecture on China’s architecture was minimal. It was not until the 1980s, as China reopened to the world, that various schools of thought from the post-industrial West flowed into China, which significantly enriched the types and sources of China’s 20th-century architectural heritage. Modern Classicism, late Modernism and Postmodernism all found their way into China’s contemporary architecture.

With the progress of urbanization in China, the pace of urban renewal is accelerating. Various factors have prompted the transformation of industrial buildings in the city. Following the transformation, old industrial buildings have shown a new look with diversification and modernization. This article briefly describes contemporary China. The background of industrial building renovation and the analysis of the redevelopment and utilization modes as well as renovation strategies in conjunction with case studies provide a summary and enlightenment for the renovation of industrial heritage buildings in the city.

This paper first reviews the definition of protected areas under Chinese law, and it pays attention to problems of using four types of building materials in protected areas: traditional building materials produced by old craftsmanship, traditional components collected from the torn down old buildings, antique-style building materials made from industrial production and well-designed modern building materials with Chinese characteristics. By elaborating on the four different selections of building materials, it analyses the advantages and disadvantages of each selection.

In most Chinese villages, mountains and water are essential resources for human life, which residents have established close connections with through subsistence and production activities. These connections involve geographical, functional, and spiritual effects, which create the unique cultural identity of a place. As a kind of rural heritage, rural industrial heritage is a concrete result of the interaction between local activities and mountains and water, thus presenting specific local characteristics. The conservation and re-use of rural heritage have become an important issue in global rural studies. Different cases that have been transformed and re-used are analyzed in this paper, in order to explore the influence of mountains and water on their local characteristics, the effects on their conservation and re-use in both spiritual and functional aspects, and suitable regeneration patterns based on local characteristics. Comparative analysis of 3D maps, diagrams, and literature materials indicate that: (1) mountains and water dominate rural industrial heritage geographical characteristics, including their layout, size, and form; (2) the direct or indirect supports of mountains and water, in terms of functional and spiritual aspects, have changed after regeneration, where spiritual supports are becoming increasingly important; and (3) regeneration patterns with different focuses represent new habitats combining natural and artificial landscapes, indicating new relationships that shift from the single utilization of mountain and water resources in the past to symbiosis and mutual benefits between residents, heritage, nature, and local communities in the modern context.

Quantifier-negation (Q-Neg) sentences are sentences like ‘All teachers did not use Donald’s car,’ where a negation word and universal quantifier occur in the subject position. There are both surface scope (all>not) and inverse scope (not>all) readings in English, but only the surface scope (all>not) reading is allowed in Chinese. This study conducted a picture-matching truth value judgment experiment to examine whether English-dominant heritage Chinese speakers know the difference between English and Chinese regarding the interpretation of Q-Neg sentences. The data reveals three different groups of participants: a. participants who accepted the inverse scope reading in both languages; b. participants who rejected the inverse scope reading in both languages; c. participants who accepted the inverse scope reading in English but rejected it in Chinese. Implications regarding heritage language research will be discussed.

With the rapid development of urban construction, the waterfront industrial heritage park has played an active role in shaping the city’s image, regional economic development and environmental improvement, and the continuation of the city’s waterfront history. The waterfront park based on industrial heritage using post-occupancy evaluation will help improve the sustainable management, maintenance, and design level of the project in the future. However, there is insufficient research on the waterfront industrial heritage park using post-occupancy evaluation. This paper takes Shanghai Houtan Park and Xuhui Binjiang Park, the representative industrial heritage parks in China, as the research objects. Through field investigation and nearly 200 questionnaires and interviews regarding user behavior, the importance of design elements (place characteristics, natural environmental characteristics, usability characteristics, and administrative characteristics) and the correlation of satisfaction help us to understand the use of the two parks and analyze and organize the survey data, carrying out the analysis of the questionnaire results using frequency analysis, IPA analysis, t-test, variance analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The research results include: (1) Both parks are mainly used by people in their twenties and forties, and the trail received the highest utilization rate as the main facility, while the visitor center in charge of guiding functions had the lowest utilization rate. (2) While Houtan Park received high satisfaction with natural environmental characteristics, it was found that Xu Hui Binjiang Park had relatively high satisfaction with the place and usability characteristics. (3) The natural environmental characteristics of Houtan Park have a positive impact on overall satisfaction and return visit satisfaction. Site characteristics and utilization characteristics of Xuhui Binjiang Industrial Park have a positive impact on overall satisfaction, while usability characteristics have a positive impact on return visit satisfaction. Finally, according to the questions and suggestions raised by users, an optimization strategy is proposed for the renewal of the park, and it is hoped that it can provide suggestions for the reconstruction and design of similar Chinese waterfront industrial heritage parks.

Jinan City, Shandong Province, is one of the important cities in modern industrial production and development in China. It plays an important role in the industrial history of modern China and has a very rich industrial cultural heritage. Hefei City, Anhui Province, from a small city, through reform and innovation, has become a rising star of Chinese cities, with per capita GDP approaching Jinan. In this paper, the single variable time series prediction model based on LSTM is used to fit the Area GDP of Jinan and Hefei in 31 years from 1990 to 2020, and the Area GDP data of the two cities in the next three years is predicted. Finally, combined with the development of foreign old industrial cities, this paper puts forward some suggestions for the future development of Jinan.

Summary： In the article, the authors analyse the primary problems which arose during the design product development in the field of industrial furniture production during the period from the beginning of the 20th century, including during the opening of China, to the present. The vector of the furniture industry development is studied through the industrial design evolution. The reasons for the emergence of a new style in furniture design in China, analysed in detail in connection with changes in economic and cultural realities, are studied. The question of the influence of the Song dynasty aesthetics on the formation and development of a "new language" in furniture design is touched upon. This dynasty’s cultural heritage formed the basis of the new style in design not only in terms of appearance, shape and structure but also in a deeper understanding of the principles of constructing form and meaning inherent in traditional Chinese culture. As an important part of the ancient culture of China, the Song Dynasty aesthetics is an invaluable spiritual national heritage of the entire nation, which is fully reflected in the revival of mass interest in national culture in the field of technical aesthetics and industrial production. Compared to Russia, the modern model of design development is completely different. Design in Russia largely follows the development vector laid down within the framework of the Soviet Union's “technical aesthetics” and still largely meets the needs of the industry (of course, with the necessary adjustment for time). In Russian history, the formation of the profession of a designer coincided with two revolutions: a political revolution that led to a change in social attitudes, and an artistic revolution that began before the first and continued after it, while Chinese modern design did not seem to have experienced such significant perturbations. However, it seems that the concept of the New style of design in China and the concept of Russian modern design, based on the experience of the Soviet period, rely on traditions, actively incorporate innovations and strive to find a unique path that best suits the development vector of each of the countries.

Traditional villages constitute rural systems with rich cultural heritage resources and the potential for tourism development. Improving resilience in the tourism industry in traditional villages in the post-pandemic era must be urgently reconsidered. This study focuses on the Chinese villages of Zhang Guying and Rebala in Hunan Province and uses a qualitative analysis method. Through in-depth study of two case villages, the study finds that traditional Chinese villages, especially tourist-oriented traditional villages, are more vulnerable to the impact of the epidemic than cities and other places. However, because of their unique traditional cultural connotations, traditional Chinese villages have the potential to enhance tourism resilience in the post-epidemic era through cultural excavation and cultural creative production. The embossed patterns, couplet stories, architecture and folk culture of traditional villages can be used for cultural and creative production. The production of digital products and physical cultural and creative products, and the formation of related industrial chains, will help improve the resilience of village tourism. The joint action of villages, attractiveness (scenic spots), production, social capital, government structure, and cultural creativity helps to transform “vulnerable individuals” into “ resilient industrial structures”. This research helps to reconsider whether the past tourism concepts (cultural creativity and creative tourism) have an effect on existing tourism destinations (especially Chinese traditional villages) in the context of the post-epidemic era, and whether they can be rejuvenated. Like other small organizational structures facing the threat of the epidemic, Chinese traditional villages have problems such as insufficient costs and reduced resource advantages. This study will focus on these issues to explore how cultural creativity can help improve existing problems and enhance tourism resilience.

As the precious cultural heritage of the Chinese nation, traditional costumes are in urgent need of scientific research and protection. In particular, there are scanty studies on costume silhouettes, due to the reasons of the need for cultural relic protection, and the strong subjectivity of manual measurement, which limit the accuracy of quantitative research. This paper presents an automatic measurement method for traditional Chinese costume dimensions based on fuzzy C-means clustering and silhouette feature point location. The method is consisted of six steps: (1) costume image acquisition; (2) costume image preprocessing; (3) color space transformation; (4) object clustering segmentation; (5) costume silhouette feature point location; and (6) costume measurement. First, the relative total variation model was used to obtain the environmental robustness and costume color adaptability. Second, the FCM clustering algorithm was used to implement image segmentation to extract the outer silhouette of the costume. Finally, automatic measurement of costume silhouette was achieved by locating its feature points. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method could effectively segment the outer silhouette of a costume image and locate the feature points of the silhouette. The measurement accuracy could meet the requirements of industrial application, thus providing the dual value of costume culture research and industrial application.

<p><em>The purpose of this research is to know</em> <em>a series of activities in Peh Cun Festival and the meaning of each procession carried out. The festival which is celebrated by Chinese Society in Tangerang has its own cultural and historical values. The Method used in this research is Explanative Qualitative Method with a generative approach that gives a detailed identification of a series of Peh Cun Festival celebrated by the Chinese Society and the meaning of the activity. </em><em>This research used literature study analysis by comparing and studying several literacies such as textbooks, scientific journals and others related to Peh Cun Festival and the meaning of each process carried out</em><em>. The results of this research are describes of a series of activities and meanings from the holding of the Peh Cun Festival. The conclusion of this research is</em> <em>The Peh Cun Festival is a summer festival celebrated by the Chinese Society with its own significance preserved as cultural heritage. </em><em></em></p>

Miao silver, generally referred to as the unique silver ornaments manufactured by the Miao ethnicity with over 400 years of history, was listed as a Chinese national intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Through primary research methods, including local investigation, interviews, and workshops at Maliao Village in Guizhou, this study found that sizeable industrial production shrank the market needs for traditional Miao silver handicrafts. A growing number of young Miao people pursue higher incomes and leave their hometowns to make a living in cities instead of engaging in Miao silver handcrafting in villages. Based on the difficulties encountered in the inheritance of Miao silver craftsmanship, this project creatively proposed a digital strategy based on the NFT digital twin application to preserve and maintain Miao silver technology in the context of the metaverse era. By conducting design experiments combining digital technology and the traditional Miao silver manufacturing techniques, a collection of NFT digital twins, digital duplications of Miao silver handicrafts that Miao silversmith jointly worked with 3D technologist, was created as a vital research outcome. The results show that this attempt is beneficial to help expand the use scenarios, extend the lifespan, and increase the commercial value of Miao silver. To sum up, taking Miao silverware handicrafts as a research case, this paper dialectically discusses the relationship between industrial manufacturing and traditional handicraft industries, making contributions to the inheritance and development of Miao silver and also putting forward innovative solutions to promote the prosperity of intangible cultural heritage worldwide.

Third Front construction was a massive defensive industrialization and economic campaign in response to the threat of war from both the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s in the remote and isolated hinterlands of China, which remained a top secret for many years before 1980s. Academic community has been making growing efforts in exploring its origin, history, development and influence ever since. As the largest industrial relocation in modern Chinese history, it is crucial for understanding the complexity of China today. Based on the bibliometric analysis of the retrieved and pruned 370 bibliographic references from Google Scholar, this article identified the major references, leading authors, contributing journals, productive countries or territories and cooperating institutions, as well as hot topics and emerging trends of the research on Third Front construction. By adopting VOSviewer as the visualizing tool, the paper found that Third Front construction continues to be a hot research topic with growing trend from the perspectives of historical background, macro-policy, industrial development, third-front cities and modern development of the Third Front construction in China. It also revealed the potential research trends in urbanization, industrial heritage and Cold War related to Third Front construction. Meanwhile, the paper made a brief comparison between the research on China’s third front construction in English and Chinese languages. The findings could be of theoretical values to the academic community for the revelation of the knowledge landscape of Third Front construction and the entry point to the modern history of China.

Many Chinese people view the heritage of industrial modernization (HOIM) negatively, which leads to a lack of appreciation and conservation efforts. This study aims to verify and discuss the efficacy of the present protection system, examining the link between HOIM facility openness and its affecting aspects. To achieve this goal, this study establishes a database of 132 projects focused on HOIM in Shenyang, a prototypical city of China’s contemporary growth. It analyzes their distribution patterns and preservation condition, and analytical methods such as correspondence analysis and regression analysis are used. The results reveal that factors such as private enterprises as facility users and conversion into cultural and commercial facilities have a positive impact on the openness of HOIM, of which cases increased after the establishment of the local protection system. To use private capital more flexibly and effectively, ways to improve the relationship between the rights and obligations of the government and private subjects in the protection system must be considered in future. This study clarifies the panorama of the conservation situation of HOIM and offers insights that may contribute to improving the protection system in local cities in China, such as Shenyang, in the future.

The paper examines the history of Chinese translations of the works of the British economistW. S. Jevons in the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries as part of the process of introduction of Western scientific knowledge to China. The attention is focused on the translations of Jevons’s Primer of Political Economy and his book The State in Relation to Labor . The terminological features of Chinese translations of these works are analyzed, including the searches for equivalents of modern scientific vocabulary in the heritage of Chinese culture. Jevons’s textbook was translated by Joseph Edkins and Yan Fu, who proposed their methods of adapting the text to the perception of the Chinese reader. The paper demonstrates that Edkins’s translation faithfully followed the original and used Chinese terminology available at that time. The clarity of Jevons’s textbook contributed to the dissemination of elementary knowledge of Western economics in China. The Policy to Enrich the Nation and Support the People served in China as one of the earliest sources of information about Adam Smith, his concept of division of labor, the theory of exchange, the theory of wages, and the principles of taxation. Multiple versions of hieroglyphic transliteration of Jevons’s name obstructed the formation of comprehensive vision of his legacyin China, therefore one of the objectives of the paper was to collect all available information about Chinese translations of the economic works of the British scholar. Jevons’s theory of the impact of natural factors on economic cycles influenced Liang Qichao, who compared it with ancient Chinese ideas about the relationship of famine and natural disasters with location of celestial bodies. After the translation of the Primer of Political Economy the focus of attention shifted to Jevons’s works in industrial legislation and finances.

Abstract Ancient Chinese embroidery is an important intangible part of the cultural heritage of mankind. Its colours and contours are a major source of oriental inspiration and design elements for designers today. This study presents an effective intelligent recognition of colour and contour based on K-means++ clustering and the Canny operator for colour and contour application of ancient Chinese embroidery images and for digital inheritance and innovation. First, digital cameras and portable scanners were used in embroidery image acquisition. Second, colour level adjustment, sharpening and smoothing were specially added to the preprocessing, because of the ancient embroidery age or colour errors caused by the shooting angle. Third, K-means++ clustering was used for colour clustering. Fourth, the Canny operator was used for contour detection. After the addition of colour level adjustment and sharpening in the preprocessing, the colours and contours could be acquired accurately and more effectively from embroidery images and be read and edited independently.

<p>Womanese scripts (also called Nushu女書) has been praised as one of the Chinese</p><p>special and secret languages, and a kind of unique characters used by women only. Designing "culture" into products will be a design trend in the global market. Based on the research of cultural and creative product design, this article analyzes Womanese scripts and artifacts from three aspects to explore new cultural product designs. Combined with the Scenario approach, this article will construct a framework for turning Cultural paradigm to Cultural product design. Taking the case of Chinese Womanese scripts, the conversion of cultural products is carried out to verify the value of the research framework. Therefore, a general framework is proposed for Womanese scripts to translate culture creative industrial design that applies to a culture product design and economic model. Besides, Womanese scripts is a kind of emotional product that can be expressed and transmitted into modern life and can increase the emotional interaction between people. This has a great significance to the cultural creative industry design and economic model, such as historical and cultural heritage.</p>

Abstract As one of the representative silk-woven artworks of the 20th century in China, Chinese Xiangjin brocade, well-known as “the flower of Oriental art”, draws on the essence of Sichuan brocade, Yun brocade, Song brocade, so as to form its own unique artistic style. It also takes the lead in the innovation of traditional brocade in key processes such as craftsmanship, design and jacquard, whose drawing technique is the exact core skill making it intangible cultural heritage. So far, there have been few studies on crafts and textile design in China before the 20th century or even after the reform and opening up, and rather fewer studies on the structure of Xiangjin brocade in the 20th century. This paper attempts to record and classify 1008 pieces of Xiangjin brocade in the Suzhou Silk Archive, China, as well as to find out their design features, oriental flavour, and unique weaving techniques. In addition, the cultural connotation of Xiangjin brocade as the painting medium was also put forward by analysing those brocades' historical texts, images, and style.

This paper presents the early results of a study aimed at experimenting an innovative approach to the design and the evaluation of complex urban transformation processes, based on the combined use of different design strategies and tools. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate, by means of a case study, a multi-level decision aiding process, able to support strategic urban design, with specific reference to regeneration processes for abandoned industrial sites in urban areas. The case study presented in the paper concerns different alternative proposals for the requalification of the former Shougang/Er-Tong mechanical factory in Beijing, China. The choice of a Chinese case study as a field test for an experimentation about mixed methods research approaches in the domain of urban transformation is related to the peculiar emerging conditions of that context, in which huge economic potentials are speeding up the transformation but a substantial lack of cultural and methodological instruments to manage a so fast modification exists. During the design process, three methods in particular have been combined according to a multi-phase design: (i) Stakeholders Analysis, (ii) Multicriteria Analysis, and (iii) Discounted Cash Flow Analysis. Each one of them has been applied in parallel to the evolution of the different design scenarios. The results of the performed study show that mixed methods approaches are a promising line of research in the field of environmental evaluation and urban design. Insights and guidelines for the replication of the proposed methodological approach in other territorial contexts are also proposed.

The Large Machine Factory (LMF) was built in the complex historical context of the late Qing Dynasty (1840–1912). Its space and construction faithfully record the architectural and cultural fusion between Chinese and western traditions and mark the beginning of modern architectural techniques in China. Through historical data and empirical studies, the historical background and architectural characteristics of the LMF were analyzed, and interventions aimed at ensuring authenticity were established. The cultural significance and results of construction were considered two crucial elements in terms of outstanding characteristics. Comprehensive inspection and assessment strategies were discussed, with minimal intervention and interpretation principles. Preventive reinforcement of the foundation, complementary reinforcement of the main structures, restoration of the historic façade and environment, and adaptive spatial interventions were found to be effective ways to ensure authenticity. The principles of minimal intervention and interpretability, which include prevention, recognizability, invisibility, subsidiarity, and intertextuality, were proposed through a comparison with the literature and practical experience. This study provides an appropriate technical reference for ensuring authenticity in the conservation and reuse of modern historic buildings with complex contexts. We propose a new understanding of intervention principles and suggest a guiding intervention path that avoids the complexities arising from the generalized interpretations of authenticity.

Chinese New Year prints constitute a significant component of the country’s cultural heritage and folk art. Yangliuqing New Year prints are the most important and widely circulated of all the different kinds of New Year prints. Due to a variety of factors including societal change, industrial structure change, and economic development, New Year prints, which were deeply rooted in agricultural society, have been adversely impacted, and have even reached the brink of disappearance. With the protection and effort from the government and researchers, New Year prints can finally be preserved. However, the underlying problems remain, such as receiving little attention, a singular product form, and being unable to keep up with the times, especially among the younger generation. In this paper, the researchers first processed Yangliuqing New Year prints through the GANs model. Then, the image is segmented by binarization and color extraction of images from the Pop art dataset by the K-Means algorithm, followed by colorizing the binarized and segmented image. Finally, usable high-quality Pop art style Yangliuqing New Year prints are generated. The generated images are used in the development of cultural and creative products. Questionnaires were then distributed based on the empirical research scale. The results of this study are as follows: 1. The method proposed in this study can generate high-quality Pop art style New Year prints. 2 Using Pop art style New Year print images in the design of cultural and creative products is popular among the younger generation, and they possess a great propensity to purchase. This study solves the problems encountered by the current cultural heritage of New Year prints, and broadens the artistic expression forms and product categories, and provides research ideas for the cultural heritage of the same type that is facing similar problems. In the future, researchers will continue to explore the incorporation of AI technology in New Year prints to stimulate the vitality of traditional cultural heritage.

The article analyzes the hydronymy and hydrographic state of the rivers of Kazakhstan in the Middle Ages according to the works of Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, orientalist, Arabic scholar, philologist V.V. Bartold, in comparison with the research of Soviet and Kazakh specialists in history, geography, and linguistics. There are used various works of Academician V.V. Bartold as research materials, including his articles on the rivers of the Kazakh land written for the Encyclopedia of Islam, toponymic, geographical, and historical works of Soviet and Kazakh specialists in history, geography, and linguistics. In the course of the research, the author tries to form a historical and geographical image of medieval Kazakhstan by studying the works of V.V. Bartold about the rivers Irtysh, Ili, Ural, Syrdarya, Chu, and Turgai based on Arabic, Persian, Chinese and other original works of travelers, historians of the early and medieval period. The names and hydrographic states of the rivers mentioned in the article are presented in comparison with both the arguments of the academician and their characteristics in modern geographical science. It becomes obvious as a result of discussions that his research on the river systems of Kazakhstan is still relevant among the scientific heritage of Academician V.V. Bartold. Specialists in history, geography, and linguistics in their research on this topic take as a basis the judgments and conclusions of the academician. Thus, the scientific research of the orientalist, academician V.V. Bartold has shown its viability.

Research HighlightsIn the quest to develop cities for the long run, the debate is whether to retain elements of culture or to reinvent such spaces for new uses. Cultural heritage preservation thus becomes an issue in urban planning, particularly in developing countries including Malaysia (Mohd Shakir Tamjes et al, 2017). Scholars mention that Kuala Lumpur needs to create a distinctive city identity and image if it is to achieve its bigger goal of becoming a World-Class City by 2020 (Mohamad Asri Ibrahim et al, 2017). A question raised by researchers is whether the policies to safeguard heritage buildings in Kuala Lumpur is comparable to the practices in UNESCO heritage sites such as Malacca and Georgetown (Mohd Shakir Tamjes et al, 2017). Through participant observation, combining focus group discussions, content analysis, photography, and videography, I outline how the preservation of one particular historical building, a Chinese clan association, increases the cultural value of the city’s surroundings in Kuala Lumpur, as well as being a major tourist attraction. This makes the case for the continued retention of historical buildings and practices, despite overarching social changes such as super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007). Research Objectives This paper makes the case for preserving a particular heritage building, namely the Chan See Shu Yuen Clan Association Kuala Lumpur & Selangor (CSSYKL), a clan association, pre-war historical site, and tourist attraction. Methodology How does the preservation of CSSYKL increase the cultural value of the city’s surroundings in Kuala Lumpur? This research question is answered through fieldwork by the project leader through participant observation which included photography, videography, content analysis of secondary documents, and focus group discussions with clan leaders and members. Photographic evidence is provided to argue for the case of enriching place attachment through the retention of meaning for inhabitants of Kuala Lumpur, due to the special nature it possesses. For example, Monnet (2014) conducted a photoethnography of urban space in the form of a multimedia essay, referring to the “production of data” rather than the “collection of data”. Monnet (2014) explained that images and sounds allow for attentive observation of the smallest details of daily life, and that the ethnographer experientially chooses to interpret and define what should be recorded in their photography - hence the “production of data”. This renders photographic evidence the best form of data for the case of cultural heritage preservation within the urban. Photographs were also harvested from stills captured in Google Maps under the Street View, where the journey was screen captured using Game DVR, a software which comes enclosed with Microsoft Windows 10. Results The photographic evidence shows how the preservation of cultural heritage buildings add character to the presence of Kuala Lumpur Chinatown, or Petaling Street. In the case of CSSYKL, it provides the historical elements as well as familiarity given its longstanding association with Kuala Lumpur’s history, and thus evokes the symbolic aesthetic. It provides symbolic aesthetic meaning to the future of Kuala Lumpur’s development and enriches the local cultural expression in league with the Malaysian National Cultural Policy. Ultimately, it guarantees that no matter how developed or industrialised Kuala Lumpur is, what with the move into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Things, there will still be cultural meaning and place attachment resonant within the heart and soul of Kuala Lumpur. Even in the face of super-diversity, the clan association building will still reinvent itself as a place of attachment not only to those of Chinese descent but to all who are interested to appreciate its value. Findings Chan See Shu Yuen Clan Association Kuala Lumpur & Selangor (CSSYKL) is one example of a historical building which functioned not only in the past as a community centre for the Chinese who migrated to Malaya in search of economic opportunity, but still retains its functions today as a gateway to maintaining links with Mainland China, especially in the economic dimension. Simultaneously, the heritage building also attracts tourists from all around the world, including those from China and local tourists themselves. Acknowledgement This research work is supported by the Ministry of Education of Malaysia under Grant Number FRGS/1/2018/WAB12/UKM/02/1 (Superdiversity Networks: Cantonese Clan Associations in Malaysia as Transnational Social Support System).

With the increasing prosperity of tourism, the corresponding market demand for tourist souvenirs increases. From the perspective of intangible cultural heritage, this paper takes the wood carving, one of the three carvings in “Huizhou” as an example to explore the cultural and creative artistic value of wood carving tourism. As wood carving is an important embodiment of the inheritance and development of Chinese traditional culture, its artistic form and characteristics provide rich design elements for design, and has the most artistic expression and industrial prospect, the academic circles explore its creative ideas and carving patterns from wood carving, so as to obtain new artistic inspiration. Starting with the development of “Huizhou” characteristic cultural tourism creative products, the author combines Huizhou wood carving patterns with tourism cultural and creative design from the perspective of regional culture, so as to meet the development requirements of the new era, sublimate the traditional regional elements, and how to use different design methods to show regional culture in the design of tourism cultural and creative products, it’s worth thinking about.

Nighttime light images are valuable indicators of regional economic development, and nighttime light data are now widely used in town monitoring and evaluation studies. Using the nighttime light data acquired through Luojia1-01 and the geographic information system spatial analysis method, this study analyzed the spatial vitality pattern of 402 characteristic towns in six geographic divisions of China. The average DN (Digital Number) value of Guzhen, having the highest vitality level, was 0.05665221, whereas that of Xin’an, having the lowest vitality level, was 0.00000186. A total of 89.5% of towns have a low level of vitality. The regional differences were significant; high vitality towns are concentrated in economically developed coastal areas, mainly in two large regions of east China and south central. The average lighting densities of the towns in east China and south central were 0.004838 and 0.003190, respectively. The lighting density of the towns in west central was low, and the vitality intensity was generally low. A spatially significant positive correlation of small-town vitality was observed, and “high–high” agglomeration was primarily distributed in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and Fujian coastal areas in east and south China. The towns with high vitality intensity had similarities in their geographical location, convenient transportation conditions, and profound historical heritage or cultural accumulation along with many industrial enterprises. This research empirically demonstrates the feasibility of using the 130-m-high resolution of the nighttime lighting data of Luojia1-01 to evaluate the vitality at the town scale, and the vitality evaluation focuses on the spatial attributes of the town, which is meaningful to guide the development of the town in each region given the vast area of China and the large differences in the development of different regions.

The policy planning of cultural and creative industries is the leading factor affecting the development of cultural and creative industries and is also an important factor in driving China’s economic transformation. How to combine the policy with the actual industrial development and how to scientifically assess the construction effect of cultural and creative industries and build the corresponding planning system are the key points of the current development of cultural and creative industries in Anhui Province, China. The study first analyzes the regional cultural characteristics and development status of Anhui Province, then uses Nvivo12 qualitative software to conduct grounded research and qualitative text analysis on 20 Chinese cultural and creative industry development policy texts, and summarizes three core elements that promote the development of China’s cultural and creative industry: “development task,” “development goal,” and “development guarantee.” Then, according to the three core elements of the text, we propose policy recommendations for the innovation and development of Anhui’s cultural and creative industries: focus on “cultural heritage and sustainable development” policy formulation, explore Anhui’s regional characteristics and culture; strengthen the development of urban-rural cultural integration and mechanism innovation; optimize and adjust the structure and supply of cultural industries; top-level design to clarify the strategic direction of culture, and coordinate the research tasks to empower industrial innovation. Relying on new media means, it integrates three major development strategies to build a new mechanism for internationalized communication of cultural and creative industries in Anhui Province, develop regional advantageous industries, form advantageous cultural industry clusters, effectively spread local culture, and promote sustainable development of local economy.

In recent years, the development of urbanization in China has entered a new stage with “quality” as its core. In the process of sustainable urban development, urban planning and construction relics are precious historical warnings and educational resources, and in the stage of accelerated urbanization, social transformation, and industrial upgrading, urban sites face severe pressure and challenges for conservation. This paper presents a summary analysis of various international charters concerning historical and cultural heritage in recent times, and analyzes the urban spatial structure, urban functional zoning, and the differences and evolutionary characteristics of urban construction sites between the pseudo-Manchukuo Xinjing plan and other regions of the world in the same period from a global perspective. The city of Changchun is also used as an example to systematically analyze the existing relics in Changchun using a historical-geographical perspective and spatial analysis methods. The results show that, firstly, the conservation objects of Chinese relics are being enriched and the scope of protection is being expanded, but that there is a lack of protection and utilization of urban heritage and its surrounding environment. Secondly, that the road network system and spatial structure of the pseudo-Manchukuo Xinjing city planning are basically preserved, that the urban green space and functional zoning have been changed, and that the architectural relics show a spatial distribution trend of north-north-east. Thirdly, that the urban functional zoning has been used to construct an urban relics protection area in which three suggestions for the protection of urban relics have been put forward: to establish a holistic protection system for urban planning functional areas; to establish a “district-axis-point” trinity protection model to promote the effective function recovery of urban planning and construction functional areas; and to continue the effective functions of the city. This provides reference for the study of modern urban planning ideas and solutions for current sustainable urban development, upgrading of public service facilities, and green low-carbon urban transformation.

Malaysia has inherited hundreds of heritage buildings from the past including those from the Indian, Chinese and Colonial eras apart from the indigenous traditional buildings. These buildings have the most unique ecstatic value from the viewpoint of architecture, culture, art, etc. Malaysian economy boom in 1980s spurred the need for more buildings especially in large cities. As a result, most of the historic buildings have been converted and transformed into commercial use. As reported by METP [1], Malaysian buildings energy uses are reflected by the energy consumption in the industrial and commercial sectors. Most of the buildings' energy consumption is electricity, used for running and operating the plants, lighting, lifts and escalators and other equipment in the buildings. These are amongst the factors that have resulted in the high demand for electricity in Malaysia. As outlined in the eighth Malaysia Plan, Malaysia is taking steps in conserving energy and reducing energy consumption on electricity consumption in building. This paper aims to present the breakdown of the major electricity end uses characteristics of historic buildings in Malaysia. The analysis was performed on annual data, allowing comparison with published benchmarks to give an indication of efficiency. Based on data collected a ‘normalisation’ calculated electricity consumption was established with the intention of improving the comparison between buildings in different climatic regions or with different occupancy patterns. This is useful for identifying where the design needed further attention and helped pinpoint problem areas within a building. It is anticipated that this study would give a good indication on the electricity consumption characteristics of historic buildings in Malaysia.

Virtual reality technology can provide more display techniques to realize the interactive design of multiexhibition area of red humanities and natural resources. First of all, through the three-dimensional interactive display of cultural relics and scene reproduction of historical events, visitors can enjoy the unrestrained and immersive appreciation, make up for people’s lack of understanding of history, and let tourists personally feel the difficulties and hardships in the development of Chinese revolutionary history. Second, the digital method also provides for the pavilion and the scenic spot design personnel more creative method; dynamic scene reappearance interaction design based on virtual reality technology to promote education, protection of cultural relic collection and utilization, academic research, and the industrial development and multidimensional public welfare publicity results is blended in among them, through the panoramic, immersive, and interactive display technique, such as multilevel multiway spread red brigade culture. Virtual reality constantly imitates the real-life environment, and the application of perception sensing equipment has perception. This new technology requires us to continue to explore and research it. Virtual reality technology is a very cutting-edge subject and research field, which is very challenging. The communication form of culture has also been constantly evolving. Virtual reality technology (VR) has changed the way of traditional culture appreciation through the transmission of visual information, bringing people a new aesthetic enjoyment. Mainstream media is used to mobilize the red cultural heritage protection and scholars at home and abroad, to explore the application of virtual reality in the red culture tourist attraction planning, and to explore virtual reality applications in red open spot virtual roaming: exploration of virtual reality in the application of historical and cultural sites to red tourism management and exploration of virtual reality in the brand historical and cultural sites in the application of the travel marketing, to build an intelligent mobile communication network communication platform and broaden the new path of inheritance and protection. On the basis of studying the communication effect of traditional culture, this paper studies the possible communication effect of symphony orchestra under the new technology format under the framework of communication studies. It also analyzes and explores various factors such as the practical value, difficulty, civilized prestige, adaptability, and resistance to adversity of the culture in cultural communication and compares the methods of cultural communication. By developing a virtual instrument placed in the sphere of virtual reality space, the traditional symphony orchestra can be transformed into an interactive culture communication in virtual reality space. In this communication design, users can define their own instruments to play interactive culture communication, change the position of the instrument on the sphere interactively, and even change the sound effect of the symphony interactively by rotating or adjusting the size of the sphere, so as to achieve the best communication effect of the symphony.

Abstract China’s film industry has its historical roots across the four geographical divisions of northern, eastern, western, and southern China. Each of these four film-producing regions has their own characteristics with divergent historical heritages and cultural resources. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the division of administrative regions included a territorially divided management policy of film enterprises. Such policies promoted the regional development of China’s film industry while simultaneously exacerbated the complex contradictions between and among the clusters produced. In the 1950s, four major state-owned film studios were established in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changchun. Under the planned economy model, films were purchased and sold exclusively by the state through these studios. Since the 1990s, China’s film industry has undergone deep institutional reform, with film distribution and exhibition gradually moving towards the market and private enterprises beginning to actively participate in film production and distribution. The film industry has since begun to actively explore the generative potential of the existing industrial clusters, experimenting with film co-production and cross-regional business operations across the regions. With the goal of constructing a film and television alliance, the film industry has sought to maximize the advantages of different regions to promote the integration of these historically and regionally distinct sectors in an open and tolerant manner, laying the foundation for Chinese films to leapfrog into the global film market.

The spatial distribution pattern of brownfields can help governments at all levels, and investors have more detailed information on land resources, prioritize brownfield redevelopment, and guide urban spatial and strategic planning. Despite increasing global concern, yet knowledge of brownfield distribution patterns at the macro-scale remains limited, especially in China. Derived from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Web of Science (WOS), and Chinese Industrial Heritage List published between 2001 and 2019, we present the first comprehensive dataset of known brownfield sites and their distributions in China. The results revealed that the dataset contains 816 georeferenced brownfield records from 255 cities. Brownfields were mainly distributed southeast of the “Heihe-Tengchong Line,” with an overall spatial distribution pattern of “East-dense-West-sparse.” In terms of brownfield type, industrial brownfields were the most numerous, followed by mining brownfields. Nearest neighbor indicator analysis suggested that brownfields in China present significant spatial agglomeration characteristics, and that the six types of brownfields manifest different scales of spatial agglomeration. The hot spots were mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, and Pearl River Delta urban agglomerations. Factors influencing brownfield formation were related to industrial structure adjustments, resource depletion, accelerated urbanization, and the orientation of national policies, with industrial structure adjustments being the leading cause. Mastering the spatial distribution of brownfields can coordinate land use transformation planning and guide brownfield redevelopment.

This study reports the genetic diversity among Chilean heritage blood-flesh peaches and the characterization of phytochemicals and bioactive compounds present in these fruits. A genetic diversity analysis using 7,934 SNP markers was performed. The average observed heterozygosity (Ho=0.09) was very low in the 75 Chilean blood-flesh peach trees, whereas 14 commercial peach varieties had significantly higher levels of heterozygosity (Ho=0.32). Furthermore, the blood-flesh peach lines were genetically similar, and all of these lines were genetically different from the commercial varieties. A comparative analysis was carried out between the epicarp and mesocarp of the peach fruits. Fruit quality parameters were evaluated at harvest (weight, size, firmness and soluble solids), and concentrations of total polyphenols, anthocyanins, carotenoids, as were macro (P, K, Ca, Mg) and microelements (Fe, Zn, Mn, B, Cu). These analyses showed that blood-flesh peaches have high concentrations of anthocyanins (cyanidin-3-glucoside (C3G) and cyanidin-3-rutinoside (C3R)) when compared to commercial varieties with white or yellow mesocarps. A comparison was performed among Chinese, French and Chilean varieties, with similar values found for the antioxidant compounds. No significant differences in the microand macroelement contents were detected in these blood-flesh fruits compared to commercial varieties.

Introduction In the elite space of Haute Couture, fashion is presented through a theatrical array of dynamics—the engagement of specific bodies performing for select audiences in highly curated spaces. Each element is both very precise in its objectives and carefully selected for impact. In this way, the production of Haute Couture makes itself accessible to only a few select members of society. Globally, there are only an estimated 4,000 direct consumers of Haute Couture (Hendrik). Given this limited market, the work of elite couturiers relies on other forms of artistic media, namely film, photography, and increasingly, museum spaces, to reach broader audiences who are then enabled to participate in the fashion ‘space’ via a process of visual consumption. For these audiences, Haute Couture is less about material consumption than it is about the aspirational consumption and contestation of notions of identity. This article uses qualitative textual analysis and draws on semiotic theory to explore symbolism and values in Haute Couture. Semiotics, an approach popularised by the work of Roland Barthes, examines signifiers as elements of the construction of metalanguage and myth. Barthes recognised a broad understanding of language that extended beyond oral and written forms. He acknowledged that a photograph or artefact may also constitute “a kind of speech” (111). Similarly, fashion can be seen as both an important signifier and mode of communication. The model of fashion as communication is one extensively explored within culture studies (e.g. Hall; Lurie). Much of the discussion of semiotics in this literature is predicated on sender/receiver models. These models conceive of fashion as the mechanism through which individual senders communicate to another individual or to collective (and largely passive) audiences (Barnard). Yet, fashion is not a unidirectional form of communication. It can be seen as a dialogical and discursive space of encounter and contestation. To understand the role of Haute Couture as a contested space of identity and socio-political discourse, this article examines the work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei. An artisan such as Guo Pei places the results of needle and thread into spaces of the theatrical, the spectacular, and, significantly, the powerfully socio-political. Guo Pei’s contributions to Haute Couture are extravagant, fantastical productions that also serve as spaces of socio-cultural information exchange and debate. Guo Pei’s creations bring together political history, memory, and fantasy. Here we explore the socio-cultural and political semiotics that emerge when the humble stitch is dramatically amplified onto the Haute Couture runway. We argue that Guo Pei’s work speaks not only to a cultural imaginary but also to the contested nature of gender and socio-political authority in contemporary China. The Politicisation of Fashion in China The majority of literature regarding Chinese fashion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has focussed on the use of fashion to communicate socio-political messages (Finnane). This is most clearly seen in analyses of the connections between dress and egalitarian ideals during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. As Zhang (952-952) notes, revolutionary fashion emphasised simplicity, frugality, and homogenisation. It rejected style choices that reflected both traditional Chinese and Western fashions. In Mao’s China, fashion was utilised by the state and adopted by the populace as a means of reinforcing the regime’s ideological orientations. For example, the ubiquitous Mao suit, worn by both men and women during the Cultural Revolution “was intended not merely as a unisex garment but a means to deemphasise gender altogether” (Feng 79). The Maoist regime’s intention to create a type of social equality through sartorial homogenisation was clear. Reflecting on the ways in which fashion both responded to and shaped women’s positionality, Mao stated, “women are regarded as criminals to begin with, and tall buns and long skirts are the instruments of torture applied to them by men. There is also their facial makeup, which is the brand of the criminal, the jewellery on their hands, which constitutes shackles and their pierced ears and bound feet which represent corporal punishment” (Mao cited in Finnane 23). Mao’s suit—the homogenising militaristic uniform adopted by many citizens—may have been intended as a mechanism for promoting equality, freeing women from the bonds of gendered oppression and all citizens from visual markers of class. Nonetheless, in practice Maoist fashion and policing of appearance during the Cultural Revolution enforced a politics of amnesia and perversely may have “entailed feminizing the undesirable, by conflating woman, bourgeoisie, and colour while also insisting on a type of gender equality that the belted Mao jacket belied” (Chen 161). In work on cultural transformations in the post-Maoist period, Braester argues that since the late 1980s Chinese cultural products—here taken to include artefacts such as Haute Couture—have similarly been defined by the politics of memory and identity. Evocation of historically important symbols and motifs may serve to impose a form of narrative continuity, connecting the present to the past. Yet, as Braester notes, such strategies may belie stability: “to contemplate memory and forgetting is tantamount to acknowledging the temporal and spatial instability of the post-industrial, globalizing world” (435). In this way, cultural products are not only sites of cultural continuity, but also of contestation. Imperial Dreams of Feminine Power The work of Chinese couturier Guo Pei showcases traditional Chinese embroidery techniques alongside more typically Western fashion design practices as a means of demonstrating not only Haute Couturier craftsmanship but also celebrating Chinese imperial culture through nostalgic fantasies in her contemporary designs. Born in Beijing, in 1967, at the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Guo Pei studied fashion at the Beijing Second Light Industry School before working in private and state-owned fashion houses. She eventually moved to establish her own fashion design studio and was recognised as “the designer of choice for high society and the political elite” in China (Yoong 19). Her work was catapulted into Western consciousness when her cape, titled ‘Yellow Empress’ was donned by Rihanna for the 2015 Met Gala. The design was a response to an era in which the colour yellow was forbidden to all but the emperor. In the same year, Guo Pei was named an invited member of La Federation de la Haute Couture, becoming the first and only Chinese-born and trained couturier to receive the honour. Recognition of her work at political and socio-economic levels earned her an award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Economy and Cultural Diplomacy’ by the Asian Couture Federation in 2019. While Maoist fashion influences pursued a vision of gender equality through the ‘unsexing’ of fashion, Guo Pei’s work presents a very different reading of female adornment. One example is her exquisite Snow Queen dress, which draws on imperial motifs in its design. An ensemble of silk, gold embroidery, and Swarovski crystals weighing 50 kilograms, the Snow Queen “characterises Guo Pei’s ideal woman who is noble, resilient and can bear the weight of responsibility” (Yoong 140). In its initial appearance on the Haute Couture runway, the dress was worn by 78-year-old American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice, signalling the equation of age with strength and beauty. Rather than being a site of torture or corporal punishment, as suggested by Mao, the Snow Queen dress positions imagined traditional imperial fashion as a space for celebration and empowerment of the feminine form. The choice of model reinforces this message, while simultaneously contesting global narratives that conflate women’s beauty and physical ability with youthfulness. In this way, fashion can be understood as an intersectional space. On the one hand, Guo Pei's work reinvigorates a particular nostalgic vision of Chinese imperial culture and in doing so pushes back against the socio-political ‘non-fashion’ and uniformity of Maoist dress codes. Yet, on the other hand, positioning her work in the very elite space of Haute Couture serves to reinstate social stratification and class boundaries through the creation of economically inaccessible artefacts: a process that in turn involves the reification and museumification of fashion as material culture. Ideals of femininity, identity, individuality, and the expressions of either creating or dismantling power, are anchored within cultural, social, and temporal landscapes. Benedict Anderson argues that the museumising imagination is “profoundly political” (123). Like sacred texts and maps, fashion as material ephemera evokes and reinforces a sense of continuity and connection to history. Yet, the belonging engendered through engagement with material and imagined pasts is imprecise in its orientation. As much as it is about maintaining threads to an historical past, it is simultaneously an appeal to present possibilities. In his broader analysis, Anderson explores the notion of parallelity, the potentiality not to recreate some geographically or temporally removed place, but to open a space of “living lives parallel …] along the same trajectory” (131). Guo Pei’s creations appeal to a similar museumising imagination. At once, her work evokes both a particular imagined past of imperial grandeur, against instability of the politically shifting present, and appeals to new possibilities of gendered emancipation within that imagined space. Contesting and Complicating East-West Dualism The design process frequently involves borrowing, reinterpretation, and renewal of ideas. The erasure of certain cultural and political aspects of social continuity through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the socio-political changes thereafter, have created fertile ground for an artist like Guo Pei. Her palimpsest reaches back through time, picks up those cultural threads of extravagance, and projects them wholesale into the spaces of fashion in the present moment. Cognisance of design intentionality and historical and contemporary fashion discourses influence the various interpretations of fashion semiotics. However, there are also audience-created meanings within the various modes of performance and consumption. Where Kaiser and Green assert that “the process of fashion is inevitably linked to making and sustaining as well as resisting and dismantling power” (1), we can also observe that sartorial semiotics can have different meanings at different times. In the documentary, Yellow Is Forbidden, Guo Pei reflects on shifting semiotics in fashion. Speaking with a client, she remarks that “dragons and phoenixes used to represent the Chinese emperor—now they represent the spirit of the Chinese” (Brettkelly). Once a symbol of sacred, individual power, these iconic signifiers now communicate collective national identity. Both playing with and reimagining not only the grandeur of China’s imperial past, but also the particular role of the feminine form and female power therein, Guo Pei’s corpus evokes and complicates such contestations of power. On the one hand, her work serves to contest homogenising narratives of identity and femininity within China. Equally important, however, are the ways in which this work, which is possible both through and in spite of a Euro-American centric system of patronage within the fashion industry, complicates notions of East-West dualism. For Guo Pei, drawing on broadly accessible visual signifiers of Chinese heritage and culture has been critical in bringing attention to her endeavours. Her work draws significantly from her cultural heritage in terms of colour selections and traditional Chinese embroidery techniques. Symbols and motifs peculiar to Chinese culture are abundant: lotus flowers, dragons, phoenixes, auspicious numbers, and favourable Chinese language characters such as buttons in the shape of ‘double happiness’ (囍) are often present in her designs. Likewise, her techniques pay homage to traditional craft work, including Peranakan beading. The parallelity conjured by these choices is deliberate. In staging Guo Pei’s work for museum exhibitions at museums such as the Asian Civilizations Museum, her designs are often showcased beside the historical artefacts that inspired them (Fu). On her Chinese website, Guo Pei, highlights the historical connections between her designs and traditional Chinese embroidery craft through a sub-section of the “Spirit” header, entitled simply, “Inheritance”. These influences and expressions of Chinese culture are, in Guo Pei's own words her “design language” (Brettkelly). However, Guo Pei has also expressed an ambivalence about her positioning as a Chinese designer. She has maintained that she does not want “to be labelled as a Chinese storyteller ... and thinks about a global audience” (Yoong). In her expression of this desire to both derive power through design choices and historically situated practices and symbols, and simultaneously move beyond nationally bounded identity frameworks, Guo Pei positions herself in a space ‘betwixt and between.’ This is not only a space of encounter between East and West, but also a space that calls into question the limits and possibilities of semiotic expression. Authenticity and Legitimacy Global audiences of fashion rely on social devices of diffusion other than the runway: photography, film, museums, and galleries. Unique to Haute Couture, however, is the way in which such processes are often abstracted, decontextualised and pushed to the extremities of theatrical opulence. De Perthuis argues that to remove context “greatly reduce[s] the social, political, psychological and semiotic meanings” of fashion (151). When iconic motifs are utilised, the western gaze risks falling back on essentialising reification of identity. To this extent, for non-Chinese audiences Guo Pei’s works may serve not so much to problemitise historical and contemporary feminine identities and inheritances, so much as project an essentialisation of Chinese femininity. The double-bind created through Guo Pei’s simultaneous appeal to and resistance of archetypical notions of Chinese identity and femininity complicates the semiotic currency of her work. Moreover, Guo Pei’s work highlights tensions concerning understandings of Chinese culture between those in China and the diaspora. In her process of accessing reference material, Guo Pei has necessarily been driven to travel internationally, due to her concerns about a lack of access to material artefacts within China. She has sought out remnants of her ancestral culture in both the Chinese diaspora as well as material culture designed for export (Yoong; Brettkelly). This borrowing of Chinese design as depicted outside of China proper, alongside the use of western influences and patronage in Guo’s work has resulted in her work being dismissed by critics as “superficial … export ware, reimported” (Thurman). The insinuation that her work is derivative is tinged with denigration. Such critiques question not only the authenticity of the motifs and techniques utilised in Guo Pei’s designs, but also the legitimacy of the narratives of both feminine and Chinese identity communicated therein. Questions of cultural ‘authenticity’ serve to deny how culture, both tangible and intangible, is mutable over time and space. In his work on tourism, Taylor suggests that wherever “the production of authenticity is dependent on some act of (re)production, it is conventionally the past which is seen to hold the model of the original” (9). In this way, legitimacy of semiotic communication in works that evoke a temporally distant past is often seen to be adjudicated through notions of fidelity to the past. This authenticity of the ‘traditional’ associates ‘tradition’ with ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity.’ It is itself a form of mythmaking. As Guo Pei’s work is at once quintessentially Chinese and, through its audiences and capitalist modes of circulation, fundamentally Western, it challenges notions of authenticity and legitimacy both within the fashion world and in broader social discourses. Speaking about similar processes in literary fiction, Colavincenzo notes that works that attempt to “take on the myth of historical discourse and practice … expose the ways in which this discourse is constructed and how it fails to meet the various claims it makes for itself” (143). Rather than reinforcing imagined ‘truths’, appeals to an historical imagination such as that deployed by Guo Pei reveal its contingency. Conclusion In Fashion in Altermodern China, Feng suggests that we can “understand the sartorial as situating a set of visible codes and structures of meaning” (1). More than a reductionistic process of sender/receiver communication, fashion is profoundly embedded with intersectional dialogues. It is not the precision of signifiers, but their instability, fluidity, and mutability that is revealing. Guo Pei’s work offers narratives at the junction of Chinese and foreign, original and derivative, mythical and historical that have an unsettled nature. This ineffable tension between construction and deconstruction draws in both fashion creators and audiences. Whether encountering fashion on the runway, in museum cabinets, or on magazine pages, all renditions rely on its audience to engage with processes of imagination, fantasy, and memory as the first step of comprehending the semiotic languages of cloth. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2016. Barnard, Malcolm. "Fashion as Communication Revisited." Fashion Theory. Routledge, 2020. 247-258. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: J. Cape, 1972. Braester, Yomi. "The Post-Maoist Politics of Memory." A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Yingjin Zhang. London: John Wiley and Sons. 434-51. Brettkelly, Pietra (dir.). Yellow Is Forbidden. Madman Entertainment, 2019. Chen, Tina Mai. "Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao's China." Fashion Theory 5.2 (2001): 143-71. Colavincenzo, Marc. "Trading Fact for Magic—Mythologizing History in Postmodern Historical Fiction." Trading Magic for Fact, Fact for Magic. Ed. Marc Colavincenzo. Brill, 2003. 85-106. De Perthuis, Karen. "The Utopian 'No Place' of the Fashion Photograph." Fashion, Performance and Performativity: The Complex Spaces of Fashion. Eds. Andrea Kollnitz and Marco Pecorari. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 145-60. Feng, Jie. Fashion in Altermodern China. Dress Cultures. Eds. Reina Lewis and Elizabeth Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Fu, Courtney R. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Fashion Theory 25.1 (2021): 127-140. Hall, Stuart. "Encoding – Decoding." Crime and Media. Ed. Chris Greer. London: Routledge, 2019. Hendrik, Joris. "The History of Haute Couture in Numbers." Vogue (France), 2021. Kaiser, Susan B., and Denise N. Green. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. London: Bloomsbury, 1992. Taylor, John P. "Authenticity and Sincerity in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 28.1 (2001): 7-26. Thurman, Judith. "The Empire's New Clothes – China’s Rich Have Their First Homegrown Haute Couturier." The New Yorker, 2016. Yoong, Jackie. "Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture." Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2019. Zhang, Weiwei. "Politicizing Fashion: Inconspicuous Consumption and Anti-Intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution in China." Journal of Consumer Culture 21.4 (2021): 950-966.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the recovery and resilience tourism strategies and possible future development of four main Chinese tourism cities. Design/methodology/approach The authors collected data from the official accounts of tourism administrations of these cities, tourist attractions and opinions from media and newspapers in Sina Weibo platform. The authors adopted an inductive approach in observing relevant social media posts and applied content analysis to identify main China’s tourism prevention and recovery strategies. Findings During the mass pandemic infection period, top-down prevention and control measures were implemented by the Chinese central and local governments, with feasible and regional recovery policies and protocols being adapted according to local situations. Measures related to tourism industrial re-employment, improvement of international images and governmental financial supports to re-boost local tourism in Chinese cities were paid great attention. Digitalization, close-to-nature and cultural heritages became important factors in the future development of China’s tourism. Dark tourism, as a potential tourism recovery strategy, also obtained huge emergence, for the memory of people deceased in the pandemic and for the inheritance of national patriotism. Originality/value This study enriches the current literature in urban tourism recovery studies analyzing the specific case of Chinese tourism cities and fulfill some voids of previous research mostly focused on the first wave of the pandemic and the recovery strategies mainly of Western cities. It also provides valuable suggestions to tourism practitioners, destinations and urban cities in dealing with regional tourism recession and finding possible solutions for the scenario associated to the COVID-19 and other similar health crisis.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs infamously changed the law to read: “some animals are more equal than others” (108). From Charlotte’s Web to Babe, there are a plethora of contemporary cultural references, as well as expressions of their intelligence and worth, which would seem to support the pigs’ cause. However, simultaneously, the term “pig” is also synonymous with negative attributes—greed, dirtiness, disarray, brutality and chauvinism. Pigs are also used to name those out of favour, including police officers, the obese, capitalists and male chauvinists. Yet, the animal’s name is also used to express the most extraordinary and unlikely events as in “pigs might fly”. On the one hand, pigs are praised and represented as intelligent and useful, but then they are derided as unclean and slovenly. We are similarly paradoxical in our relationship with then, ranging from using them as a food source to keeping them as pets, and from seeing them as a valuable farm animal/resource or dangerous feral pest depending on which side of the farm gate they are on. Pigs also give a voice to many aspects of popular culture and feature in novels, fairytales, cartoons, comics and movies. As food, pigs are both for feasts and forbidden, their meat the site of both desire and disgust. They are smoked, roasted, fried, stewed and braised, and farmed in the worst of industrial food producing factories. They are also leading the charge in an eating revolution which is calling for heritage, free-range, organic and cruelty-free farming. Snuck into dishes during the Inquisition to expose false conversos, pigs are today seen by some as unclean, inedible and/or fattening and, yet, they provide the symbolic heart of tip-to-tail eating and some of the most expensive and desired of foodie products: heritage Spanish hams, for instance. In an age where to be slender is the goal of many, pigs have been bred and farmed to provide pork which is ever leaner, and yet, their fat—at its most unctuous and melting—is providing a space where the most celebrated of chefs revel. When more and more people are disconnected from what they eat, snout-to-tail eaters are dining on recognisable pigs’ ears, pig’s head filled pies and braised trotters. For many, pigs are the other white meat.Those of us who grew up with television muppet, Miss Piggy, are familiar with the mixed feelings that pigs can evoke. As the contributions to this issue attest, the idea of “pig” can evoke a similarly wide range of responses from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. While as editors we approached the idea of “pig” from an interdisciplinary food studies approach, the symbolic, and even iconic, significance of the pig is a central concern of all of the papers. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it so elegantly “food has to be good to think as well as to eat” (1963: 128). A number of the authors in this issue have responded with a regional or country-specific focus, and include perspectives from, or about, places and cultures as diverse as Ireland, Tonga, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the USA and China. “The Pig in Irish Cuisine and Culture”, the title and subject of Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire’s historical analysis, opens with the fact that more pork is eaten per capita than any other meat in Ireland but pigs themselves are almost invisible. Various themes confirm the importance of pigs in Irish culture—literature, folklore, the domestication of the animal and their value in household economics, their role in feasts and how they are raised, killed, prepared and consumed. How the history of the pig in Ireland complements that of the potato—the food item more widely recognised as a major contributor to Irish cuisine—is also included, as are an indication of the new interpretations of Irish pork and bacon dishes by contemporary chefs. In Tonga, conversely, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people, although they are very significant in Tongan life and culture precisely because of this ceremonial importance. In “Pu‘aka Tonga,” ex-resident of Tonga Mandy Treagus, explains that this is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since Cook visited the area and named it the “Friendly Islands”. Treagus also critiques the ways in which the Tongan diet has changed, and how food in Tonga is a neo-colonial issue with pervasive and, sometimes, negative ramifications for Tongans.Jeremy Fisher’s memoir “Tusk” similarly weaves personal and cultural history together, this time in New Zealand. “Tusk” orients the life story of the narrator’s father around the watershed moment he experienced when he killed a boar at 16. The tusks he took from the killing were mounted on gold and accompanied him throughout his life, as well as acting as a reminder to others of his act. The tusks thus function as a physical reminder of the night he spent out in the bush and killed the boar, but also a remembrance of both change and continuity over time. Jenny Smith moves us spatially, and temporally, to the Soviet Union in her “Tushonka: Cultivating Soviet Postwar Taste”. During the Second World War, the USA sent meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. However, after receiving several shipments of SPAM, a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka, was requested. Smith uses the example of tuskonka to trace how this pig-based product not only kept soldiers alive during the war, but how later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritised muscle over fat and influenced pig breeding programs. Smith asserts that this had a significant influence on faming and food processing in the Soviet Union, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer.Pigs are at the centre of debates that have arisen from the growth of a number of social movements that are becoming increasingly mainstream, reminding us that they are also alive, and beings in their own right. These movements include environmentalism, vegetarianism and other alternative food movements advocating ethical eating. Thus, in his analysis of alien creatures with pig and human features in the science fiction series Dr Who, “Those Pig-Men Things”, Brett Mills explores our reactions to these characters and their fates. Discussing why pig-human representations are capable of being both “shocking and horrific”, but also of arousing our empathy, Mills’s analysis suggests the possibility of more complex notions of human/non-human interaction. It also assists in working towards, as he states, “helpfully destabilis[ing our] simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race.” The deepest form of human-animal interaction underlies Peta S. Cook and Nicholas Osbaldiston’s “Pigs Hearts and Human Bodies: A Cultural Approach to Xenotransplantation”. Cook and Osbaldiston discuss how our categorisation of animals as a lower species has enabled their exploitation, arguing how, in the contemporary West, we largely attribute “a sacred high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies.” The authors provide a compelling account of the social and cultural ramifications of the use of pigs in xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation), a process in which the current “choice” animal source is pigs. The line dividing human and animal can at other times be a tenuous one, demonstrated by the anxiety generated over eating practices exposed in fears of eating “like a pig”. In her article, “Sugar Pigs: Children’s Consumption of Confectionery”, Toni Risson explains how rules about eating and concealing food in the mouth remind us that eating is an animal act that instruction is required to modify and control. Children’s lolly-eating rituals—sharing half-eaten food, monitoring the progress of its consumption and change, and using fingers to inspect this change or pull stuck lollies off teeth—can evoke disgust in adults, but can also create friendship networks, intimacy and a sense of belonging for children as they transgress the rules of civilised eating. As Risson puts it, as “the antithesis of civilisation, the pig is the means by which we understand ourselves as civilised beings, but the child with a lolly is an ever-present reminder that we may be animals after all”.Feminism can be added to this list of social movements, with Arhlene Ann Flowers drawing attention to the power of language in her article “Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?”. Flowers chronicles the linguistic battle between the presidential candidates in the US 2008 campaign over the colloquialism “lipstick on a pig”, used in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Flowers traces the history of this phrase, as well as the use of other porcine terms in political language including “pork barrelling” and “male chauvinist pig.”In her article about New York’s first gastrobpub, The Spotted Pig, one of the co-editors of this issue, Donna Lee Brien, has constructed a brief restaurant biography for the eatery famous for founding chef April Bloomfield’s nose-to-tail, locally sourced pork dishes. In this, Brien reflects upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining, whether as “raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, brand, symbol or marketing tool.” In Lillian Ng’s novel, Swallowing Clouds, references to pigs are similarly closely related to food, but in her article, Spanish author Catalina Ribas Segura argues these references to flesh and meat evoke the concepts of freedom, transgression and desire. In “Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds”, Segura focuses on pork and the pig and what these reveal about the two main characters’ relationship. One of these, Zhu Zhiyee, is a butcher, which means that pigs and pork are recurrent topics throughout the novel, but other porcine expressions appear throughout. Pig-related terminology in the novel provides a means for Segura to consider the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, and includes a discussion about the connotations of pigs in Chinese culture, where pork is used in a variety of dishes. Lee McGowan’s “Piggery and Predictability: An Exploration of the Hog in Football’s Limelight” focuses in more closely on one of the uses to which we have put pigs, discussing how far “the beautiful game” of football (soccer) has come from the days when an inflated pigs bladder was used as the ball.Reversing this focus from use back to how we, as humans, relate to animals, can show that how we conceive of pigs in our human history reveals our own prejudices. It is known that pigs and humans have interacted for some 10,000 years. The history of that interaction and their own adaptability mean that pigs have a broad range of possible relationships with humans, wider and more complex than either that of many other species or our contemporary treatment of them would attest. The other co-editor of this issue, Adele Wessell, takes a historical perspective to restore pigs to the centre of the narrative in “Making a Pig of the Humanities.” Drawing on a growing body of work on nonhuman animals, Wessell is interested in what a history of pigs and our relationship with them reveals about humans more generally. She argues that all the significant themes in modern history—production, religion, the body, science, power, the national state, colonialism, gender, consumption, migration, memory—can be understood through a history of our relationships with pigs. Jim Hearn is a chef, a researcher and writer. Hearn’s article “Percy” is the story of a pig who, as the only pig in the farmyard, longs to “escape the burden of allegory”. All Percy wanted was to belong, but his pig-ness caused offence to all the other animals in the farm. Percy’s story is about belonging and identity, body-image and representation, told from a pig’s point of view. Percy is burdened with the layers of meaning that have built up around pigs and longs to escape, and this fable provides a fitting ending to this issue.Together, we hope the articles in this collection indicate the wide significance and large number of meanings of “pig” that are possible for different cultures and across historical periods, and the place that pigs inhabit in our national, popular and food cultures. They reveal how pigs are used and misused, as well as how they are understood and misunderstood. These interesting and diverse articles also show how pigs are both material and allegorical; how they are paradoxical in how they are revered, avoided and derided; and, commonly, how they are eaten. ReferencesOrwell, George. Animal Farm. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library—Library Society, 2004.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Boston, Beacon Press, 1963.

Introduction“From every kind of man obedience I expect; I’m the Emperor of Japan.” (“Miyasama,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical The Mikado, 1885)This commentary is facilitated by—surprisingly resilient—oriental stereotypes of an imagined Japan (think of Oscar Wilde’s assertion, in 1889, that Japan was a European invention). During the Victorian era, in Britain, there was a craze for all things oriental, particularly ceramics and “there was a craze for all things Japanese and no middle class drawing room was without its Japanese fan or teapot.“ (V&A Victorian). These pastoral depictions of the ‘oriental life’ included the figures of men and women in oriental garb, with fans, stilt shoes, kimono-like robes, and appropriate headdresses, engaging in garden-based activities, especially tea ceremony variations (Landow). In fact, tea itself, and the idea of a ceremony of serving it, had taken up a central role, even an obsession in middle- and upper-class Victorian life. Similarly, landscapes with wild seas, rugged rocks and stunted pines, wizened monks, pagodas and temples, and particular fauna and flora (cranes and other birds flying through clouds of peonies, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums) were very popular motifs (see Martin and Koda). Rather than authenticity, these designs heightened the Western-based romantic stereotypes associated with a stylised form of Japanese life, conducted sedately under rule of the Japanese Imperial Court. In reality, prior to the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Emperor was largely removed from everyday concerns, residing as an isolated, holy figure in Kyoto, the traditional capital of Japan. Japan was instead ruled from Edo (modern day Tokyo) led by the Shogun and his generals, according to a strict Confucian influenced code (see Keene). In Japan, as elsewhere, the presence of feudal-style governance includes policies that determine much of everyday life, including restrictions on clothing (Rall 169). The Samurai code was no different, and included a series of protocols that restricted rank, movement, behaviour, and clothing. As Vincent has noted in the case of the ‘lace tax’ in Great Britain, these restrictions were designed to punish those who seek to penetrate the upper classes through their costume (28-30). In Japan, pre-Meiji sumptuary laws, for example, restricted the use of gold, and prohibited the use of a certain shade of red by merchant classes (V&A Kimono).Therefore, in the governance of pre-globalised societies, the importance of clothing and textile is evident; as Jones and Stallybrass comment: We need to understand the antimatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mould and shape them both physically and socially—to constitute subjects through their power as material memories […] Clothing is a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body. (2-3, emphasis added)The significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities are explored here through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions. There are many ways to examine how indigenous cultures respond to European, British, or American (hereafter Western) influences, particularly in times of conflict (Wilk). Western ideology arrived in Japan after a long period of isolation (during which time Japan’s only contact was with Dutch traders) through the threat of military hostility and war. It is after this outside threat was realised that Japan’s adoption of military and industrial practices begins. The re-imagining of their national identity took many forms, and the inclusion of a Western-style military costuming as a schoolboy uniform became a highly visible indicator of Japan’s mission to protect its sovereign integrity. A brief history of Japan’s rise from a collection of isolated feudal states to a unified military power, in not only the Asian Pacific region but globally, demonstrates the speed at which they adopted the Western mode of warfare. Gunboats on Japan’s ShorelinesJapan was forcefully opened to the West in the 1850s by America under threat of First Name Perry’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (Hillsborough 7-8). Following this, Japan underwent a rapid period of modernisation, and an upsurge in nationalism and military expansion that was driven by a desire to catch up to the European powers present in the Pacific. Noted by Ian Ferguson in Civilization: The West and the Rest, Unsure, the Japanese decided […] to copy everything […] Japanese institutions were refashioned on Western models. The army drilled like Germans; the navy sailed like Britons. An American-style system of state elementary and middle schools was also introduced. (221, emphasis added)This was nothing short of a wide-scale reorganisation of Japan’s entire social structure and governance. Under the Emperor Meiji, who wrested power from the Shogunate and reclaimed it for the Imperial head, Japan steamed into an industrial revolution, achieving in a matter of years what had taken Europe over a century.Japan quickly became a major player-elect on the world stage. However, as an island nation, Japan lacked the essentials of both coal and iron with which to fashion not only industrial machinery but also military equipment, the machinery of war. In 1875 Japan forced Korea to open itself to foreign (read: Japanese) trade. In the same treaty, Korea was recognised as a sovereign nation, separate from Qing China (Tucker 1461). The necessity for raw materials then led to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), a conflict between Japan and China that marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power. The Korean Peninsula had long been China’s most important client state, but its strategic location adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, and its natural resources of coal and iron, attracted Japan’s interest. Later, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), allowed a victorious Japan to force Russia to abandon its expansionist policy in the Far East, becoming the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power. The Russo-Japanese War developed out of the rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and Manchuria, again in the struggle for natural resources (Tucker 1534-46).Japan’s victories, together with the county’s drive for resources, meant that Japan could now determine its role within the Asia-Pacific sphere of influence. As Japan’s military, and their adoption of Westernised combat, proved effective in maintaining national integrity, other social institutions also looked to the West (Ferguson 221). In an ironic twist—while Victorian and Continental fashion was busy adopting the exotic, oriental look (Martin and Koda)—the kimono, along with other essentials of Japanese fashions, were rapidly altered (both literally and figuratively) to suit new, warlike ideology. It should be noted that kimono literally means ‘things that you wear’ and which, prior to exposure to Western fashions, signified all worn clothing (Dalby 65-119). “Wearing Things” in Westernised JapanAs Japan modernised during the late 1800s the kimono was positioned as symbolising barbaric, pre-modern, ‘oriental’ Japan. Indeed, on 17 January 1887 the Meiji Empress issued a memorandum on the subject of women’s clothing in Japan: “She [the Empress] believed that western clothes were in fact closer to the dress of women in ancient Japan than the kimonos currently worn and urged that they be adopted as the standard clothes of the reign” (Keene 404). The resemblance between Western skirts and blouses and the simple skirt and separate top that had been worn in ancient times by a people descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu wo mikami, was used to give authority and cultural authenticity to Japan’s modernisation projects. The Imperial Court, with its newly ennobled European style aristocrats, exchanged kimono silks for Victorian finery, and samurai armour for military pomp and splendour (Figure 1).Figure 1: The Meiji Emperor, Empress and Crown Prince resplendent in European fashions on an outing to Asukayama Park. Illustration: Toyohara Chikanobu, circa 1890.It is argued here that the function of a uniform is to prepare the body for service. Maids and butlers, nurses and courtesans, doctors, policemen, and soldiers are all distinguished by their garb. Prudence Black states: “as a technology, uniforms shape and code the body so they become a unit that belongs to a collective whole” (93). The requirement to discipline bodies through clothing, particularly through uniforms, is well documented (see Craik, Peoples, and Foucault). The need to distinguish enemies from allies on the battlefield requires adherence to a set of defined protocols, as referenced in military fashion compendiums (see Molloy). While the postcolonial adoption of Western-based clothing reflects a new form of subservience (Rall, Kuechler and Miller), in Japan, the indigenous garments were clearly designed in the interests of ideological allegiance. To understand the Japanese sartorial traditions, the kimono itself must be read as providing a strong disciplinary element. The traditional garment is designed to represent an upright and unbending column—where two meters of under bindings are used to discipline the body into shape are then topped with a further four meters of a stiffened silk obi wrapped around the waist and lower chest. To dress formally in such a garment requires helpers (see Dalby). The kimono both constructs and confines the women who wear it, and presses them into their roles as dutiful, upper-class daughters (see Craik). From the 1890s through to the 1930s, when Japan again enters a period of militarism, the myth of the kimono again changes as it is integrated into the build-up towards World War II.Decades later, when Japan re-established itself as a global economic power in the 1970s and 1980s, the kimono was re-authenticated as Japan’s ‘traditional’ garment. This time it was not the myth of a people descended from solar deities that was on display, but that of samurai strength and propriety for men, alongside an exaggerated femininity for women, invoking a powerful vision of Japanese sartorial tradition. This reworking of the kimono was only possible as the garment was already contained within the framework of Confucian family duty. However, in the lead up to World War II, Japanese military advancement demanded of its people soldiers that could win European-style wars. The quickest solution was to copy the military acumen and strategies of global warfare, and the costumes of the soldiery and seamen of Europe, including Great Britain (Ferguson). It was also acknowledged that soldiers were ‘made not born’ so the Japanese educational system was re-vamped to emulate those of its military rivals (McVeigh). It was in the uptake of schoolboy uniforms that this re-imagining of Japanese imperial strength took place.The Japanese Schoolboy UniformCentral to their rapid modernisation, Japan adopted a constitutional system of education that borrowed from American and French models (Tipton 68-69). The government viewed education as a “primary means of developing a sense of nation,” and at its core, was the imperial authorities’ obsession with defining “Japan and Japaneseness” (Tipton 68-69). Numerous reforms eventually saw, after an abolition of fees, nearly 100% attendance by both boys and girls, despite a lingering mind-set that educating women was “a waste of time” (Tipton 68-69). A boys’ uniform based on the French and Prussian military uniforms of the 1860s and 1870s respectively (Kinsella 217), was adopted in 1879 (McVeigh 47). This jacket, initially with Prussian cape and cap, consists of a square body, standing mandarin style collar and a buttoned front. It was through these education reforms, as visually symbolised by the adoption of military style school uniforms, that citizen making, education, and military training became interrelated aspects of Meiji modernisation (Kinsella 217). Known as the gakuran (gaku: to study; ran: meaning both orchid, and a pun on Horanda, meaning Holland, the only Western country with trading relations in pre-Meiji Japan), these jackets were a symbol of education, indicating European knowledge, power and influence and came to reflect all things European in Meiji Japan. By adopting these jackets two objectives were realised:through the magical power of imitation, Japan would, by adopting the clothing of the West, naturally rise in military power; and boys were uniformed to become not only educated as quasi-Europeans, but as fighting soldiers and sons (suns) of the nation.The gakuran jacket was first popularised by state-run schools, however, in the century and a half that the garment has been in use it has come to symbolise young Japanese masculinity as showcased in campus films, anime, manga, computer games, and as fashion is the preeminent garment for boybands and Japanese hipsters.While the gakuran is central to the rise of global militarism in Japan (McVeigh 51-53), the jacket would go on to form the basis of the Sun Yat Sen and Mao Suits as symbols of revolutionary China (see McVeigh). Supposedly, Sun Yat Sen saw the schoolboy jacket in Japan as a utilitarian garment and adopted it with a turn down collar (Cumming et al.). For Sun Yat Sen, the gakuran was the perfect mix of civilian (school boy) and military (the garment’s Prussian heritage) allowing him to walk a middle path between the demands of both. Furthermore, the garment allowed Sun to navigate between Western style suits and old-fashioned Qing dynasty styles (Gerth 116); one was associated with the imperialism of the National Products Movement, while the other represented the corruption of the old dynasty. In this way, the gakuran was further politicised from a national (Japanese) symbol to a global one. While military uniforms have always been political garments, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the world was rocked by revolutions and war, civilian clothing also became a means of expressing political ideals (McVeigh 48-49). Note that Mahatma Ghandi’s clothing choices also evolved from wholly Western styles to traditional and emphasised domestic products (Gerth 116).Mao adopted this style circa 1927, further defining the style when he came to power by adding elements from the trousers, tunics, and black cotton shoes worn by peasants. The suit was further codified during the 1960s, reaching its height in the Cultural Revolution. While the gakuran has always been a scholarly black (see Figure 2), subtle differences in the colour palette differentiated the Chinese population—peasants and workers donned indigo blue Mao jackets, while the People’s Liberation Army Soldiers donned khaki green. This limited colour scheme somewhat paradoxically ensured that subtle hierarchical differences were maintained even whilst advocating egalitarian ideals (Davis 522). Both the Sun Yat Sen suit and the Mao jacket represented the rejection of bourgeois (Western) norms that objectified the female form in favour of a uniform society. Neo-Maoism and Mao fever of the early 1990s saw the Mao suit emerge again as a desirable piece of iconic/ironic youth fashion. Figure 2: An example of Gakuran uniform next to the girl’s equivalent on display at Ichikawa Gakuen School (Japan). Photo: Emerald King, 2015.There is a clear and vital link between the influence of the Prussian style Japanese schoolboy uniform on the later creation of the Mao jacket—that of the uniform as an integral piece of worn propaganda (Atkins).For Japan, the rapid deployment of new military and industrial technologies, as well as a sartorial need to present her leaders as modern (read: Western) demanded the adoption of European-style uniforms. The Imperial family had always been removed from Samurai battlefields, so the adoption of Western military costume allowed Japan’s rulers to present a uniform face to other global powers. When Japan found itself in conflict in the Asia Pacific Region, without an organised military, the first requirement was to completely reorganise their system of warfare from a feudal base and to train up national servicemen. Within an American-style compulsory education system, the European-based curriculum included training in mathematics, engineering and military history, as young Britons had for generations begun their education in Greek and Latin, with the study of Ancient Greek and Roman wars (Bantock). It is only in the classroom that ideological change on a mass scale can take place (Reference Please), a lesson not missed by later leaders such as Mao Zedong.ConclusionIn the 1880s, the Japanese leaders established their position in global politics by adopting clothing and practices from the West (Europeans, Britons, and Americans) in order to quickly re-shape their country’s educational system and military establishment. The prevailing military costume from foreign cultures not only disciplined their adopted European bodies, they enforced a new regime through dress (Rall 157-174). For boys, the gakuran symbolised the unity of education and militarism as central to Japanese masculinity. Wearing a uniform, as many authors suggest, furthers compliance (Craik, Nagasawa Kaiser and Hutton, and McVeigh). As conscription became a part of Japanese reality in World War II, the schoolboys just swapped their military-inspired school uniforms for genuine military garments.Re-imagining a Japanese schoolboy uniform from a European military costume might suit ideological purposes (Atkins), but there is more. The gakuran, as a uniform based on a close, but not fitted jacket, was the product of a process of advanced industrialisation in the garment-making industry also taking place in the 1800s:Between 1810 and 1830, technical calibrations invented by tailors working at the very highest level of the craft [in Britain] eventually made it possible for hundreds of suits to be cut up and made in advance [...] and the ready-to-wear idea was put into practice for men’s clothes […] originally for uniforms for the War of 1812. (Hollander 31) In this way, industrialisation became a means to mass production, which furthered militarisation, “the uniform is thus the clothing of the modern disciplinary society” (Black 102). There is a perfect resonance between Japan’s appetite for a modern military and their rise to an industrialised society, and their conquests in Asia Pacific supplied the necessary material resources that made such a rapid deployment possible. The Japanese schoolboy uniform was an integral part of the process of both industrialisation and militarisation, which instilled in the wearer a social role required by modern Japanese society in its rise for global power. Garments are never just clothing, but offer a “world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body” (Jones and Stallybrass 3-4).Today, both the Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura). References Atkins, Jaqueline. Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States. Princeton: Yale UP, 2005.Bantock, Geoffrey Herman. Culture, Industrialisation and Education. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968.Black, Prudence. “The Discipline of Appearance: Military Style and Australian Flight Hostess Uniforms 1930–1964.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 91-106.Craik, Jenifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Cumming, Valerie, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. “Mao Style.” The Dictionary of Fashion History. Eds. Valerie Cumming, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Dalby, Liza, ed. Kimono: Fashioning Culture. London: Vintage, 2001.Davis, Edward L., ed. Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. London: Routledge, 2005.Dees, Jan. Taisho Kimono: Speaking of Past and Present. Milan: Skira, 2009.Ferguson, N. Civilization: The West and the Rest. London: Penguin, 2011.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1997. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, Cambridge: East Asian Harvard Monograph 224, 2003.Gilbert, W.S., and Arthur Sullivan. The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu. 1885. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/mk_lib.pdf›. Hillsborough, Romulus. Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen through the Eyes of the Shogun's Last Samurai. Vermont: Tuttle, 2014.Jones, Anne R., and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.King, Emerald L. “Schoolboys and Kimono Ladies.” Presentation to the Un-Thinking Asian Migrations Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 24-26 Aug. 2014. Kinsella, Sharon. “What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?” Fashion Theory 6.2 (2002): 215-37. Kuechler, Susanne, and Daniel Miller, eds. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Landow, George P. “Liberty and the Evolution of the Liberty Style.” 22 Aug. 2010. ‹http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/liberty/lstyle.html›.Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda. Orientalism: Vision of the East in Western Dress. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling, and Self-Presentation in Japan. Oxford: Berg, 2000.Molloy, John. Military Fashion: A Comparative History of the Uniforms of the Great Armies from the 17th Century to the First World War. New York: Putnam, 1972.Peoples, Sharon. “Embodying the Military: Uniforms.” Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 1.1 (2014): 7-21.Rall, Denise N. “Costume & Conquest: A Proximity Framework for Post-War Impacts on Clothing and Textile Art.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture, ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 157-74. Tipton, Elise K. Modern Japan: A Social and Political History. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.Tucker, Spencer C., ed. A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.V&A Kimono. Victoria and Albert Museum. “A History of the Kimono.” 2004. 2 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/a-history-of-the-kimono/›.V&A Victorian. Victoria and Albert Museum. “The Victorian Vision of China and Japan.” 10 Nov. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-victorian-vision-of-china-and-japan/›.Vincent, Susan J. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. Berg: Oxford, 2009.Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” 1889. In Intentions New York: Berentano’s 1905. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/wilde-lying.pdf›. Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Goods as a Dialogue about Development.” Cultural History 7 (1990) 79-100.

This article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian gastro-multiculturalism and a marked public resistance to other recycling and reuse of food products, have not yet been a focus of study. The process of producing Vegemite from waste would seem to align with contemporary moves towards recycling food waste, and ensuring environmental sustainability and food security, yet even during times of austerity and environmental concern this has not provided the company with a viable marketing strategy. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of product memorialisation have created a superbrand through focusing on Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value.John Scanlan notes that producing waste is a core feature of modern life, and what we dispose of as surplus to our requirements—whether this comprises material objects or more abstract products such as knowledge—reveals much about our society. In observing this, Scanlan asks us to consider the quite radical idea that waste is central to everything of significance to us: the “possibility that the surprising core of all we value results from (and creates even more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (9). Others have noted the ambivalent relationship we have with the waste we produce. C. T. Anderson notes that we are both creator and agent of its disposal. It is our ambivalence towards waste, coupled with its ubiquity, that allows waste materials to be described so variously: negatively as garbage, trash and rubbish, or more positively as by-products, leftovers, offcuts, trimmings, and recycled.This ambivalence is also crucial to understanding the affectionate relationship the Australian public have with Vegemite, a relationship that appears to exist in spite of the product’s unpalatable origins in waste. A study of Vegemite reveals that consumers can be comfortable with waste, even to the point of eating recycled waste, as long as that fact remains hidden and unmentioned. In Vegemite’s case not only has the product’s connection to waste been rendered invisible, it has been largely kept out of sight despite considerable media and other attention focusing on the product. Recycling Food Waste into Food ProductRecent work such as Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land and Tristram Stuart’s Waste make waste uncomfortably visible, outlining how much waste, and food waste in particular, the Western world generates and how profligately this is disposed of. Their aim is clear: a call to less extravagant and more sustainable practices. The relatively recent interest in reducing our food waste has, of course, introduced more complexity into a simple linear movement from the creation of a food product, to its acquisition or purchase, and then to its consumption and/or its disposal. Moreover, the recycling, reuse and repurposing of what has previously been discarded as waste is reconfiguring the whole idea of what waste is, as well as what value it has. The initiatives that seem to offer the most promise are those that reconfigure the way waste is understood. However, it is not only the process of transforming waste from an abject nuisance into a valued product that is central here. It is also necessary to reconfigure people’s acculturated perceptions of, and reactions to waste. Food waste is generated during all stages of the food cycle: while the raw materials are being grown; while these are being processed; when the resulting food products are being sold; when they are prepared in the home or other kitchen; and when they are only partly consumed. Until recently, the food industry in the West almost universally produced large volumes of solid and liquid waste that not only posed problems of disposal and pollution for the companies involved, but also represented a reckless squandering of total food resources in terms of both nutrient content and valuable biomass for society at large. While this is currently changing, albeit slowly, the by-products of food processing were, and often are, dumped (Stuart). In best-case scenarios, various gardening, farming and industrial processes gather household and commercial food waste for use as animal feed or as components in fertilisers (Delgado et al; Wang et al). This might, on the surface, appear a responsible application of waste, yet the reality is that such food waste often includes perfectly good fruit and vegetables that are not quite the required size, shape or colour, meat trimmings and products (such as offal) that are completely edible but extraneous to processing need, and other high grade product that does not meet certain specifications—such as the mountains of bread crusts sandwich producers discard (Hickman), or food that is still edible but past its ‘sell by date.’ In the last few years, however, mounting public awareness over the issues of world hunger, resource conservation, and the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste has accelerated efforts to make sustainable use of available food supplies and to more efficiently recycle, recover and utilise such needlessly wasted food product. This has fed into and led to multiple new policies, instances of research into, and resultant methods for waste handling and treatment (Laufenberg et al). Most straightforwardly, this involves the use or sale of offcuts, trimmings and unwanted ingredients that are “often of prime quality and are only rejected from the production line as a result of standardisation requirements or retailer specification” from one process for use in another, in such processed foods as soups, baby food or fast food products (Henningsson et al. 505). At a higher level, such recycling seeks to reclaim any reusable substances of significant food value from what could otherwise be thought of as a non-usable waste product. Enacting this is largely dependent on two elements: an available technology and being able to obtain a price or other value for the resultant product that makes the process worthwhile for the recycler to engage in it (Laufenberg et al). An example of the latter is the use of dehydrated restaurant food waste as a feedstuff for finishing pigs, a reuse process with added value for all involved as this process produces both a nutritious food substance as well as a viable way of disposing of restaurant waste (Myer et al). In Japan, laws regarding food waste recycling, which are separate from those governing other organic waste, are ensuring that at least some of food waste is being converted into animal feed, especially for the pigs who are destined for human tables (Stuart). Other recycling/reuse is more complex and involves more lateral thinking, with the by-products from some food processing able to be utilised, for instance, in the production of dyes, toiletries and cosmetics (Henningsson et al), although many argue for the privileging of food production in the recycling of foodstuffs.Brewing is one such process that has been in the reuse spotlight recently as large companies seek to minimise their waste product so as to be able to market their processes as sustainable. In 2009, for example, the giant Foster’s Group (with over 150 brands of beer, wine, spirits and ciders) proudly claimed that it recycled or reused some 91.23% of 171,000 tonnes of operational waste, with only 8.77% of this going to landfill (Foster’s Group). The treatment and recycling of the massive amounts of water used for brewing, rinsing and cooling purposes (Braeken et al.; Fillaudeaua et al.) is of significant interest, and is leading to research into areas as diverse as the development microbial fuel cells—where added bacteria consume the water-soluble brewing wastes, thereby cleaning the water as well as releasing chemical energy that is then converted into electricity (Lagan)—to using nutrient-rich wastewater as the carbon source for creating bioplastics (Yu et al.).In order for the waste-recycling-reuse loop to be closed in the best way for securing food supplies, any new product salvaged and created from food waste has to be both usable, and used, as food (Stuart)—and preferably as a food source for people to consume. There is, however, considerable consumer resistance to such reuse. Resistance to reusing recycled water in Australia has been documented by the CSIRO, which identified negative consumer perception as one of the two primary impediments to water reuse, the other being the fundamental economics of the process (MacDonald & Dyack). This consumer aversion operates even in times of severe water shortages, and despite proof of the cleanliness and safety of the resulting treated water. There was higher consumer acceptance levels for using stormwater rather than recycled water, despite the treated stormwater being shown to have higher concentrations of contaminants (MacDonald & Dyack). This reveals the extent of public resistance to the potential consumption of recycled waste product when it is labelled as such, even when this consumption appears to benefit that public. Vegemite: From Waste Product to Australian IconIn this context, the savoury yeast spread Vegemite provides an example of how food processing waste can be repurposed into a new food product that can gain a high level of consumer acceptability. It has been able to retain this status despite half a century of Australian gastronomic multiculturalism and the wide embrace of a much broader range of foodstuffs. Indeed, Vegemite is so ubiquitous in Australian foodways that it is recognised as an international superbrand, a standing it has been able to maintain despite most consumers from outside Australasia finding it unpalatable (Rozin & Siegal). However, Vegemite’s long product history is one in which its origin as recycled waste has been omitted, or at the very least, consistently marginalised.Vegemite’s history as a consumer product is narrated in a number of accounts, including one on the Kraft website, where the apocryphal and actual blend. What all these narratives agree on is that in the early 1920s Fred Walker—of Fred Walker and Company, Melbourne, canners of meat for export and Australian manufacturers of Bonox branded beef stock beverage—asked his company chemist to emulate Marmite yeast extract (Farrer). The imitation product was based, as was Marmite, on the residue from spent brewer’s yeast. This waste was initially sourced from Melbourne-based Carlton & United Breweries, and flavoured with vegetables, spices and salt (Creswell & Trenoweth). Today, the yeast left after Foster Group’s Australian commercial beer making processes is collected, put through a sieve to remove hop resins, washed to remove any bitterness, then mixed with warm water. The yeast dies from the lack of nutrients in this environment, and enzymes then break down the yeast proteins with the effect that vitamins and minerals are released into the resulting solution. Using centrifugal force, the yeast cell walls are removed, leaving behind a nutrient-rich brown liquid, which is then concentrated into a dark, thick paste using a vacuum process. This is seasoned with significant amounts of salt—although less today than before—and flavoured with vegetable extracts (Richardson).Given its popularity—Vegemite was found in 2009 to be the third most popular brand in Australia (Brand Asset Consulting)—it is unsurprising to find that the product has a significant history as an object of study in popular culture (Fiske et al; White), as a marker of national identity (Ivory; Renne; Rozin & Siegal; Richardson; Harper & White) and as an iconic Australian food, brand and product (Cozzolino; Luck; Khamis; Symons). Jars, packaging and product advertising are collected by Australian institutions such as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and are regularly included in permanent and travelling exhibitions profiling Australian brands and investigating how a sense of national identity is expressed through identification with these brands. All of this significant study largely focuses on how, when and by whom the product has been taken up, and how it has been consumed, rather than its links to waste, and what this circumstance could add to current thinking about recycling of food waste into other food products.It is worth noting that Vegemite was not an initial success in the Australian marketplace, but this does not seem due to an adverse public perception to waste. Indeed, when it was first produced it was in imitation of an already popular product well-known to be made from brewery by-products, hence this origin was not an issue. It was also introduced during a time when consumer relationships to waste were quite unlike today, and thrifty re-use of was a common feature of household behaviour. Despite a national competition mounted to name the product (Richardson), Marmite continued to attract more purchasers after Vegemite’s launch in 1923, so much so that in 1928, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed “Parwill—the all Australian product” (punning on the idea that “Ma-might” but “Pa-will”) (White 16). When this campaign was unsuccessful, the original, consumer-suggested name was reinstated, but sales still lagged behind its UK-owned prototype. It was only after remaining in production for more than a decade, and after two successful marketing campaigns in the second half of the 1930s that the Vegemite brand gained some market traction. The first of these was in 1935 and 1936, when a free jar of Vegemite was offered with every sale of an item from the relatively extensive Kraft-Walker product list (after Walker’s company merged with Kraft) (White). The second was an attention-grabbing contest held in 1937, which invited consumers to compose Vegemite-inspired limericks. However, it was not the nature of the product itself or even the task set by the competition which captured mass attention, but the prize of a desirable, exotic and valuable imported Pontiac car (Richardson 61; Superbrands).Since that time, multinational media company, J Walter Thompson (now rebranded as JWT) has continued to manage Vegemite’s marketing. JWT’s marketing has never looked to Vegemite’s status as a thrifty recycler of waste as a viable marketing strategy, even in periods of austerity (such as the Depression years and the Second World War) or in more recent times of environmental concern. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of cultural/media memorialisation have created a superbrand by focusing on two factors: its nutrient value and, as the brand became more established, its status as national icon. Throughout the regular noting and celebration of anniversaries of its initial invention and launch, with various commemorative events and products marking each of these product ‘birthdays,’ Vegemite’s status as recycled waste product has never been more than mentioned. Even when its 60th anniversary was marked in 1983 with the laying of a permanent plaque in Kerferd Road, South Melbourne, opposite Walker’s original factory, there was only the most passing reference to how, and from what, the product manufactured at the site was made. This remained the case when the site itself was prioritised for heritage listing almost twenty years later in 2001 (City of Port Phillip).Shying away from the reality of this successful example of recycling food waste into food was still the case in 1990, when Kraft Foods held a nationwide public campaign to recover past styles of Vegemite containers and packaging, and then donated their collection to Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse then held an exhibition of the receptacles and the historical promotional material in 1991, tracing the development of the product’s presentation (Powerhouse Museum), an occasion that dovetailed with other nostalgic commemorative activities around the product’s 70th birthday. Although the production process was noted in the exhibition, it is noteworthy that the possibilities for recycling a number of the styles of jars, as either containers with reusable lids or as drinking glasses, were given considerably more notice than the product’s origins as a recycled product. By this time, it seems, Vegemite had become so incorporated into Australian popular memory as a product in its own right, and with such a rich nostalgic history, that its origins were no longer of any significant interest or relevance.This disregard continued in the commemorative volume, The Vegemite Cookbook. With some ninety recipes and recipe ideas, the collection contains an almost unimaginably wide range of ways to use Vegemite as an ingredient. There are recipes on how to make the definitive Vegemite toast soldiers and Vegemite crumpets, as well as adaptations of foreign cuisines including pastas and risottos, stroganoffs, tacos, chilli con carne, frijole dip, marinated beef “souvlaki style,” “Indian-style” chicken wings, curries, Asian stir-fries, Indonesian gado-gado and a number of Chinese inspired dishes. Although the cookbook includes a timeline of product history illustrated with images from the major advertising campaigns that runs across 30 pages of the book, this timeline history emphasises the technological achievement of Vegemite’s creation, as opposed to the matter from which it orginated: “In a Spartan room in Albert Park Melbourne, 20 year-old food technologist Cyril P. Callister employed by Fred Walker, conducted initial experiments with yeast. His workplace was neither kitchen nor laboratory. … It was not long before this rather ordinary room yielded an extra-ordinary substance” (2). The Big Vegemite Party Book, described on its cover as “a great book for the Vegemite fan … with lots of old advertisements from magazines and newspapers,” is even more openly nostalgic, but similarly includes very little regarding Vegemite’s obviously potentially unpalatable genesis in waste.Such commemorations have continued into the new century, each one becoming more self-referential and more obviously a marketing strategy. In 2003, Vegemite celebrated its 80th birthday with the launch of the “Spread the Smile” campaign, seeking to record the childhood reminisces of adults who loved Vegemite. After this, the commemorative anniversaries broke free from even the date of its original invention and launch, and began to celebrate other major dates in the product’s life. In this way, Kraft made major news headlines when it announced that it was trying to locate the children who featured in the 1954 “Happy little Vegemites” campaign as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the television advertisement. In October 2006, these once child actors joined a number of past and current Kraft employees to celebrate the supposed production of the one-billionth jar of Vegemite (Rood, "Vegemite Spreads" & "Vegemite Toasts") but, once again, little about the actual production process was discussed. In 2007, the then iconic marching band image was resituated into a contemporary setting—presumably to mobilise both the original messages (nutritious wholesomeness in an Australian domestic context) as well as its heritage appeal. Despite the real interest at this time in recycling and waste reduction, the silence over Vegemite’s status as recycled, repurposed food waste product continued.Concluding Remarks: Towards Considering Waste as a ResourceIn most parts of the Western world, including Australia, food waste is formally (in policy) and informally (by consumers) classified, disposed of, or otherwise treated alongside garden waste and other organic materials. Disposal by individuals, industry or local governments includes a range of options, from dumping to composting or breaking down in anaerobic digestion systems into materials for fertiliser, with food waste given no special status or priority. Despite current concerns regarding the security of food supplies in the West and decades of recognising that there are sections of all societies where people do not have enough to eat, it seems that recycling food waste into food that people can consume remains one of the last and least palatable solutions to these problems. This brief study of Vegemite has attempted to show how, despite the growing interest in recycling and sustainability, the focus in both the marketing of, and public interest in, this iconic and popular product appears to remain rooted in Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value and its status as a brand, and firmly away from any suggestion of innovative and prudent reuse of waste product. That this is so for an already popular product suggests that any initiatives that wish to move in this direction must first reconfigure not only the way waste itself is seen—as a valuable product to be used, rather than as a troublesome nuisance to be disposed of—but also our own understandings of, and reactions to, waste itself.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers for their perceptive, useful, and generous comments on this article. All errors are, of course, my own. The research for this work was carried out with funding from the Faculty of Arts, Business, Informatics and Education, CQUniversity, Australia.ReferencesAnderson, C. T. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (2010): 35-60.Blake, J. The Vegemite Cookbook: Delicious Recipe Ideas. Melbourne: Ark Publishing, 1992.Braeken, L., B. Van der Bruggen and C. Vandecasteele. “Regeneration of Brewery Waste Water Using Nanofiltration.” Water Research 38.13 (July 2004): 3075-82.City of Port Phillip. “Heritage Recognition Strategy”. Community and Services Development Committee Agenda, 20 Aug. 2001.Cozzolino, M. Symbols of Australia. Ringwood: Penguin, 1980.Creswell, T., and S. Trenoweth. “Cyril Callister: The Happiest Little Vegemite”. 1001 Australians You Should Know. North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. 353-4.Delgado, C. L., M. Rosegrant, H. Steinfled, S. Ehui, and C. Courbois. Livestock to 2020: The Next Food Revolution. Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper, 28. Washington, D. C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 2009.Farrer, K. T. H. “Callister, Cyril Percy (1893-1949)”. Australian Dictionary of Biography 7. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979. 527-8.Fillaudeaua, L., P. Blanpain-Avetb and G. Daufinc. “Water, Wastewater and Waste Management in Brewing Industries”. Journal of Cleaner Production 14.5 (2006): 463-71.Fiske, J., B. Hodge and G. Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987.Foster’s Group Limited. Transforming Fosters: Sustainability Report 2009.16 June 2010 ‹http://fosters.ice4.interactiveinvestor.com.au/Fosters0902/2009SustainabilityReport/EN/body.aspx?z=1&p=-1&v=2&uid›.George Patterson Young and Rubicam (GPYR). Brand Asset Valuator, 2009. 6 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.brandassetconsulting.com/›.Harper, M., and R. White. Symbols of Australia. UNSW, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010.Henningsson, S., K. Hyde, A. Smith, and M. Campbell. “The Value of Resource Efficiency in the Food Industry: A Waste Minimisation Project in East Anglia, UK”. Journal of Cleaner Production 12.5 (June 2004): 505-12.Hickman, M. “Exposed: The Big Waste Scandal”. The Independent, 9 July 2009. 18 June 2010 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/exposed-the-big-waste-scandal-1737712.html›.Ivory, K. “Australia’s Vegemite”. Hemispheres (Jan. 1998): 83-5.Khamis, S. “Buy Australiana: Diggers, Drovers and Vegemite”. Write/Up. Eds. E. Hartrick, R. Hogg and S. Supski. St Lucia: API Network and UQP, 2004. 121-30.Lagan, B. “Australia Finds a New Power Source—Beer”. The Times 5 May 2007. 18 June 2010 ‹http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1749835.ece›.Laufenberg, G., B. Kunz and M. Nystroem. “Transformation of Vegetable Waste into Value Added Products: (A) The Upgrading Concept; (B) Practical Implementations [review paper].” Bioresource Technology 87 (2003): 167-98.Luck, P. Australian Icons: Things That Make Us What We Are. Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992.MacDonald, D. H., and B. Dyack. Exploring the Institutional Impediments to Conservation and Water Reuse—National Issues: Report for the Australian Water Conservation and Reuse Research Program. March. CSIRO Land and Water, 2004.Myer, R. O., J. H. Brendemuhl, and D. D. Johnson. “Evaluation of Dehydrated Restaurant Food Waste Products as Feedstuffs for Finishing Pigs”. Journal of Animal Science 77.3 (1999): 685-92.Pittaway, M. The Big Vegemite Party Book. Melbourne: Hill of Content, 1992. Powerhouse Museum. Collection & Research. 16 June 2010.Renne, E. P. “All Right, Vegemite!: The Everyday Constitution of an Australian National Identity”. Visual Anthropology 6.2 (1993): 139-55.Richardson, K. “Vegemite, Soldiers, and Rosy Cheeks”. Gastronomica 3.4 (Fall 2003): 60-2.Rood, D. “Vegemite Spreads the News of a Happy Little Milestone”. Sydney Morning Herald 6 Oct. 2008. 16 March 2010 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/vegemite-spreads-the-news-of-a-happy-little-milestone/2008/10/05/1223145175371.html›.———. “Vegemite Toasts a Billion Jars”. The Age 6 Oct. 2008. 16 March 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/vegemite-toasts-a-billion-jars-20081005-4uc1.html›.Royte, E. Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006.Rozin, P., and M. Siegal “Vegemite as a Marker of National Identity”. Gastronomica 3.4 (Fall 2003): 63-7.Scanlan, J. On Garbage. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.Stuart, T. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.Superbrands. Superbrands: An Insight into Many of Australia’s Most Trusted Brands. Vol IV. Ingleside, NSW: Superbrands, 2004.Symons, M. One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1982.Wang, J., O. Stabnikova, V. Ivanov, S. T. Tay, and J. Tay. “Intensive Aerobic Bioconversion of Sewage Sludge and Food Waste into Fertiliser”. Waste Management & Research 21 (2003): 405-15.White, R. S. “Popular Culture as the Everyday: A Brief Cultural History of Vegemite”. Australian Popular Culture. Ed. I. Craven. Cambridge UP, 1994. 15-21.Yu, P. H., H. Chua, A. L. Huang, W. Lo, and G. Q. Chen. “Conversion of Food Industrial Wastes into Bioplastics”. Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology 70-72.1 (March 1998): 603-14.

IntroductionIn the wine world, authenticity is not just desired, it is actively required. That demand comes from a complex of producers, distributors and consumers, and other interested parties. Consequently, the authenticity of wine is constantly created, reworked, presented, performed, argued over, contested and appreciated.At one level, such processes have clear economic elements. A wine deemed to be an authentic “expression” of something—the soil and micro-climate in which it was grown, the environment and culture of the region from which it hails, the genius of the wine-maker who nurtured and brought it into being, the quintessential characteristics of the grape variety it is made from—will likely make much more money than one deemed inauthentic. In wine, as in other spheres, perceived authenticity is a means to garner profits, both economic and symbolic (Beverland).At another level, wine animates a complicated intertwining of human tastes, aesthetics, pleasures and identities. Discussions as to the authenticity, or otherwise, of a wine often involve a search by the discussants for meaning and purpose in their lives (Grahm). To discover and appreciate a wine felt to “speak” profoundly of the place from whence it came possibly involves a sense of superiority over others: I drink “real” wine, while you drink mass-market trash (Bourdieu). It can also create reassuring senses of ontological security: in discovering an authentic wine, expressive of a certain aesthetic and locational purity (Zolberg and Cherbo), I have found a cherishable object which can be reliably traced to one particular place on Earth, therefore possessing integrity, honesty and virtue (Fine). Appreciation of wine’s authenticity licenses the self-perception that I am sophisticated and sensitive (Vannini and Williams). My judgement of the wine is also a judgement upon my own aesthetic capacities (Hennion).In wine drinking, and the production, distribution and marketing processes underpinning it, much is at stake as regards authenticity. The social system of the wine world requires the category of authenticity in order to keep operating. This paper examines how and why this has come to be so. It considers the crafting of authenticity in long-term historical perspective. Demand for authentic wine by drinkers goes back many centuries. Self-conscious performances of authenticity by producers is of more recent provenance, and was elaborated above all in France. French innovations then spread to other parts of Europe and the world. The paper reviews these developments, showing that wine authenticity is constituted by an elaborate complex of environmental, cultural, legal, political and commercial factors. The paper both draws upon the social science literature concerning the construction of authenticity and also points out its limitations as regards understanding wine authenticity.The History of AuthenticityIt is conventional in the social science literature (Peterson, Authenticity) to claim that authenticity as a folk category (Lu and Fine), and actors’ desires for authentic things, are wholly “modern,” being unknown in pre-modern contexts (Cohen). Consideration of wine shows that such a view is historically uninformed. Demands by consumers for ‘authentic’ wine, in the sense that it really came from the location it was sold as being from, can be found in the West well before the 19th century, having ancient roots (Wengrow). In ancient Rome, there was demand by elites for wine that was both really from the location it was billed as being from, and was verifiably of a certain vintage (Robertson and Inglis). More recently, demand has existed in Western Europe for “real” Tokaji (sweet wine from Hungary), Port and Bordeaux wines since at least the 17th century (Marks).Conventional social science (Peterson, Authenticity) is on solider ground when demonstrating how a great deal of social energies goes into constructing people’s perceptions—not just of consumers, but of wine producers and sellers too—that particular wines are somehow authentic expressions of the places where they were made. The creation of perceived authenticity by producers and sales-people has a long historical pedigree, beginning in early modernity.For example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, wine-makers in Bordeaux could not compete on price grounds with burgeoning Spanish, Portuguese and Italian production areas, so they began to compete with them on the grounds of perceived quality. Multiple small plots were reorganised into much bigger vineyards. The latter were now associated with a chateau in the neighbourhood, giving the wines connotations of aristocratic gravity and dignity (Ulin). Product-makers in other fields have used the assertion of long-standing family lineages as apparent guarantors of tradition and quality in production (Peterson, Authenticity). The early modern Bordelaise did the same, augmenting their wines’ value by calling upon aristocratic accoutrements like chateaux, coats-of-arms, alleged long-term family ownership of vineyards, and suchlike.Such early modern entrepreneurial efforts remain the foundations of the very high prestige and prices associated with elite wine-making in the region today, with Chinese companies and consumers particularly keen on the grand crus of the region. Globalization of the wine world today is strongly rooted in forms of authenticity performance invented several hundred years ago.Enter the StateAnother notable issue is the long-term role that governments and legislation have played, both in the construction and presentation of authenticity to publics, and in attempts to guarantee—through regulative measures and taxation systems—that what is sold really has come from where it purports to be from. The west European State has a long history of being concerned with the fraudulent selling of “fake” wines (Anderson, Norman, and Wittwer). Thus Cosimo III, Medici Grand Duke of Florence, was responsible for an edict of 1716 which drew up legal boundaries for Tuscan wine-producing regions, restricting the use of regional names like Chianti to wine that actually came from there (Duguid).These 18th century Tuscan regulations are the distant ancestors of quality-control rules centred upon the need to guarantee the authenticity of wines from particular geographical regions and sub-regions, which are today now ubiquitous, especially in the European Union (DeSoucey). But more direct progenitors of today’s Geographical Indicators (GIs)—enforced by the GATT international treaties—and Protected Designations of Origin (PDOs)—promulgated and monitored by the EU—are French in origin (Barham). The famous 1855 quality-level classification of Bordeaux vineyards and their wines was the first attempt in the world explicitly to proclaim that the quality of a wine was a direct consequence of its defined place of origin. This move significantly helped to create the later highly influential notion that place of origin is the essence of a wine’s authenticity. This innovation was initially wholly commercial, rather than governmental, being carried out by wine-brokers to promote Bordeaux wines at the Paris Exposition Universelle, but was later elaborated by State officials.In Champagne, another luxury wine-producing area, small-scale growers of grapes worried that national and international perceptions of their wine were becoming wholly determined by big brands such as Dom Perignon, which advertised the wine as a luxury product, but made no reference to the grapes, the soil, or the (supposedly) traditional methods of production used by growers (Guy). The latter turned to the idea of “locality,” which implied that the character of the wine was an essential expression of the Champagne region itself—something ignored in brand advertising—and that the soil itself was the marker of locality. The idea of “terroir”—referring to the alleged properties of soil and micro-climate, and their apparent expression in the grapes—was mobilised by one group, smaller growers, against another, the large commercial houses (Guy). The terroir notion was a means of constructing authenticity, and denouncing de-localised, homogenizing inauthenticity, a strategy favouring some types of actors over others. The relatively highly industrialized wine-making process was later represented for public consumption as being consonant with both tradition and nature.The interplay of commerce, government, law, and the presentation of authenticity, also appeared in Burgundy. In that region between WWI and WWII, the wine world was transformed by two new factors: the development of tourism and the rise of an ideology of “regionalism” (Laferté). The latter was invented circa WWI by metropolitan intellectuals who believed that each of the French regions possessed an intrinsic cultural “soul,” particularly expressed through its characteristic forms of food and drink. Previously despised peasant cuisine was reconstructed as culturally worthy and true expression of place. Small-scale artisanal wine production was no longer seen as an embarrassment, producing wines far more “rough” than those of Bordeaux and Champagne. Instead, such production was taken as ground and guarantor of authenticity (Laferté). Location, at regional, village and vineyard level, was taken as the primary quality indicator.For tourists lured to the French regions by the newly-established Guide Michelin, and for influential national and foreign journalists, an array of new promotional devices were created, such as gastronomic festivals and folkloric brotherhoods devoted to celebrations of particular foodstuffs and agricultural events like the wine-harvest (Laferté). The figure of the wine-grower was presented as an exemplary custodian of tradition, relatively free of modern capitalist exchange relations. These are the beginnings of an important facet of later wine companies’ promotional literatures worldwide—the “decoupling” of their supposed commitments to tradition, and their “passion” for wine-making beyond material interests, from everyday contexts of industrial production and profit-motives (Beverland). Yet the work of making the wine-maker and their wines authentically “of the soil” was originally stimulated in response to international wine markets and the tourist industry (Laferté).Against this background, in 1935 the French government enacted legislation which created theInstitut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) and its Appelation d’Origine Controlle (AOC) system (Barham). Its goal was, and is, to protect what it defines as terroir, encompassing both natural and human elements. This legislation went well beyond previous laws, as it did more than indicate that wine must be honestly labelled as deriving from a given place of origin, for it included guarantees of authenticity too. An authentic wine was defined as one which truly “expresses” the terroir from which it comes, where terroir means both soil and micro-climate (nature) and wine-making techniques “traditionally” associated with that area. Thus French law came to enshrine a relatively recently invented cultural assumption: that places create distinctive tastes, the value of this state of affairs requiring strong State protection. Terroir must be protected from the untrammelled free market. Land and wine, symbiotically connected, are de-commodified (Kopytoff). Wine is embedded in land; land is embedded in what is regarded as regional culture; the latter is embedded in national history (Polanyi).But in line with the fact that the cultural underpinnings of the INAO/AOC system were strongly commercially oriented, at a more subterranean level the de-commodified product also has economic value added to it. A wine worthy of AOC protection must, it is assumed, be special relative to wines un-deserving of that classification. The wine is taken out of the market, attributed special status, and released, economically enhanced, back onto the market. Consequently, State-guaranteed forms of authenticity embody ambivalent but ultimately efficacious economic processes. Wine pioneered this Janus-faced situation, the AOC system in the 1990s being generalized to all types of agricultural product in France. A huge bureaucratic apparatus underpins and makes possible the AOC system. For a region and product to gain AOC protection, much energy is expended by collectives of producers and other interested parties like regional development and tourism officials. The French State employs a wide range of expert—oenological, anthropological, climatological, etc.—who police the AOC classificatory mechanisms (Barham).Terroirisation ProcessesFrench forms of legal classification, and the broader cultural classifications which underpin them and generated them, very much influenced the EU’s PDO system. The latter uses a language of authenticity rooted in place first developed in France (DeSoucey). The French model has been generalized, both from wine to other foodstuffs, and around many parts of Europe and the world. An Old World idea has spread to the New World—paradoxically so, because it was the perceived threat posed by the ‘placeless’ wines and decontextualized grapes of the New World which stimulated much of the European legislative measures to protect terroir (Marks).Paxson shows how artisanal cheese-makers in the US, appropriate the idea of terroir to represent places of production, and by extension the cheeses made there, that have no prior history of being constructed as terroir areas. Here terroir is invented at the same time as it is naturalised, made to seem as if it simply points to how physical place is directly expressed in a manufactured product. By defining wine or cheese as a natural product, claims to authenticity are themselves naturalised (Ulin). Successful terroirisation brings commercial benefits for those who engage in it, creating brand distinctiveness (no-one else can claim their product expresses that particularlocation), a value-enhancing aura around the product which, and promotion of food tourism (Murray and Overton).Terroirisation can also render producers into virtuous custodians of the land who are opposed to the depredations of the industrial food and agriculture systems, the categories associated with terroir classifying the world through a binary opposition: traditional, small-scale production on the virtuous side, and large-scale, “modern” harvesting methods on the other. Such a situation has prompted large-scale, industrial wine-makers to adopt marketing imagery that implies the “place-based” nature of their offerings, even when the grapes can come from radically different areas within a region or from other regions (Smith Maguire). Like smaller producers, large companies also decouple the advertised imagery of terroir from the mundane realities of industry and profit-margins (Beverland).The global transportability of the terroir concept—ironic, given the rhetorical stress on the uniqueness of place—depends on its flexibility and ambiguity. In the French context before WWII, the phrase referred specifically to soil and micro-climate of vineyards. Slowly it started mean to a markedly wider symbolic complex involving persons and personalities, techniques and knowhow, traditions, community, and expressions of local and regional heritage (Smith Maguire). Over the course of the 20th century, terroir became an ever broader concept “encompassing the physical characteristics of the land (its soil, climate, topography) and its human dimensions (culture, history, technology)” (Overton 753). It is thought to be both natural and cultural, both physical and human, the potentially contradictory ramifications of such understanding necessitating subtle distinctions to ward off confusion or paradox. Thus human intervention on the land and the vines is often represented as simply “letting the grapes speak for themselves” and “allowing the land to express itself,” as if the wine-maker were midwife rather than fabricator. Terroir talk operates with an awkward verbal balancing act: wine-makers’ “signature” styles are expressions of their cultural authenticity (e.g. using what are claimed as ‘traditional’ methods), yet their stylistic capacities do not interfere with the soil and micro-climate’s natural tendencies (i.e. the terroir’sphysical authenticity).The wine-making process is a case par excellence of a network of humans and objects, or human and non-human actants (Latour). The concept of terroir today both acknowledges that fact, but occludes it at the same time. It glosses over the highly problematic nature of what is “real,” “true,” “natural.” The roles of human agents and technologies are sequestered, ignoring the inevitably changing nature of knowledges and technologies over time, recognition of which jeopardises claims about an unchanging physical, social and technical order. Harvesting by machine production is representationally disavowed, yet often pragmatically embraced. The role of “foreign” experts acting as advisors —so-called “flying wine-makers,” often from New World production cultures —has to be treated gingerly or covered up. Because of the effects of climate change on micro-climates and growing conditions, the taste of wines from a particular terroir changes over time, but the terroir imaginary cannot recognise that, being based on projections of timelessness (Brabazon).The authenticity referred to, and constructed, by terroir imagery must constantly be performed to diverse audiences, convincing them that time stands still in the terroir. If consumers are to continue perceiving authenticity in a wine or winery, then a wide range of cultural intermediaries—critics, journalists and other self-proclaiming experts must continue telling convincing stories about provenance. Effective authenticity story-telling rests on the perceived sincerity and knowledgeability of the teller. Such tales stress romantic imagery and colourful, highly personalised accounts of the quirks of particular wine-makers, omitting mundane details of production and commercial activities (Smith Maguire). Such intermediaries must seek to interest their audience in undiscovered regions and “quirky” styles, demonstrating their insider knowledge. But once such regions and styles start to become more well-known, their rarity value is lost, and intermediaries must find ever newer forms of authenticity, which in turn will lose their burnished aura when they become objects of mundane consumption. An endless cycle of discovering and undermining authenticity is constantly enacted.ConclusionAuthenticity is a category held by different sorts of actors in the wine world, and is the means by which that world is held together. This situation has developed over a long time-frame and is now globalized. Yet I will end this paper on a volte face. Authenticity in the wine world can never be regarded as wholly and simply a social construction. One cannot directly import into the analysis of that world assumptions—about the wholly socially constructed nature of phenomena—which social scientific studies of other domains, most notably culture industries, work with (Peterson, Authenticity). Ways of thinking which are indeed useful for understanding the construction of authenticity in some specific contexts, cannot just be applied in simplistic manners to the wine world. When they are applied in direct and unsophisticated ways, such an operation misses the specificities and particularities of wine-making processes. These are always simultaneously “social” and “natural”, involving multiple forms of complex intertwining of human actions, environmental and climatological conditions, and the characteristics of the vines themselves—a situation markedly beyond beyond any straightforward notion of “social construction.”The wine world has many socially constructed objects. But wine is not just like any other product. Its authenticity cannot be fabricated in the manner of, say, country music (Peterson, Country). Wine is never in itself only a social construction, nor is its authenticity, because the taste, texture and chemical elements of wine derive from complex human interactions with the physical environment. Wine is partly about packaging, branding and advertising—phenomena standard social science accounts of authenticity focus on—but its organic properties are irreducible to those factors. Terroir is an invention, a label put on to certain things, meaning they are perceived to be authentic. But the things that label refers to—ranging from the slope of a vineyard and the play of sunshine on it, to how grapes grow and when they are picked—are entwined with human semiotics but not completely created by them. A truly comprehensive account of wine authenticity remains to be written.ReferencesAnderson, Kym, David Norman, and Glyn Wittwer. “Globalization and the World’s Wine Markets: Overview.” Discussion Paper No. 0143, Centre for International Economic Studies. Adelaide: U of Adelaide, 2001.Barham, Elizabeth. “Translating Terroir: The Global Challenge of French AOC Labelling.” Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003): 127–38.Beverland, Michael B. “Crafting Brand Authenticity: The Case of Luxury Wines.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1003–29.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1992.Brabazon, Tara. “Colonial Control or Terroir Tourism? The Case of Houghton’s White Burgundy.” Human Geographies 8.2 (2014): 17–33.Cohen, Erik. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15.3 (1988): 371–86.DeSoucey, Michaela. “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union.” American Sociological Review 75.3 (2010): 432–55.Duguid, Paul. “Developing the Brand: The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880.” Enterprise and Society 4.3 (2003): 405–41.Fine, Gary A. “Crafting Authenticity: The Validation of Identity in Self-Taught Art.” Theory and Society 32.2 (2003): 153–80.Grahm, Randall. “The Soul of Wine: Digging for Meaning.” Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking. Ed. Fritz Allhoff. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 219–24.Guy, Kolleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Hennion, Antoine. “The Things That Bind Us Together.”Cultural Sociology 1.1 (2007): 65–85.Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 64–91.Laferté, Gilles. “End or Invention of Terroirs? Regionalism in the Marketing of French Luxury Goods: The Example of Burgundy Wines in the Inter-War Years.” Working Paper, Centre d’Economie et Sociologie Appliquées a l’Agriculture et aux Espaces Ruraux, Dijon.Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1993.Lu, Shun and Gary A. Fine. “The Presentation of Ethnic Authenticity: Chinese Food as a Social Accomplishment.” The Sociological Quarterly 36.3 (1995): 535–53.Marks, Denton. “Competitiveness and the Market for Central and Eastern European Wines: A Cultural Good in the Global Wine Market.” Journal of Wine Research 22.3 (2011): 245–63.Murray, Warwick E. and John Overton. “Defining Regions: The Making of Places in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Australian Geographer 42.4 (2011): 419–33.Overton, John. “The Consumption of Space: Land, Capital and Place in the New Zealand Wine Industry.” Geoforum 41.5 (2010): 752–62.Paxson, Heather. “Locating Value in Artisan Cheese: Reverse Engineering Terroir for New-World Landscapes.” American Anthropologist 112.3 (2010): 444–57.Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.———. “In Search of Authenticity.” Journal of Management Studies 42.5 (2005): 1083–98.Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. “The Global Animus: In the Tracks of World Consciousness.” Globalizations 1.1 (2006): 72–92.Smith Maguire, Jennifer. “Provenance and the Liminality of Production and Consumption: The Case of Wine Promoters.” Marketing Theory 10.3 (2010): 269–82.Trubek, Amy. The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2008.Ulin, Robert C. “Invention and Representation as Cultural Capital.” American Anthropologist 97.3 (1995): 519–27.Vannini, Phillip, and Patrick J. Williams. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.Wengrow, David. “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.” Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 7–34.Zolberg, Vera and Joni Maya Cherbo. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.